There's a statistics problem here. Firstly, by Bayes's rule, absence of evidence is evidence of absence: if you didn't find any evidence of harm from piracy when you looked for it, that increases your posterior probability that there isn't any harm from piracy.

Secondly, this isn't just a case of insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is the most pro-piracy conclusion that could ever come from a study framed as "let's see if there are harmful effects from piracy" — and let's face it, that's the only framing of the study that's going to get funding. The only stronger result possible would be a larger study with the same conclusion.

The quoted blurb (I haven't checked if this checks out in the study proper) does seem to suggest that at least in some cases, the report found the positive result that it isn't harmful:

> On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales.

Sounds like a case of "correlation implying causation". If a game is famous ie downloaded a lot from legal sales then it does stand to reason that there will be a huge number of people trying to illegally download it too.

Surely this is an obvious thing to control for; if they didn't, it would conversely be extremely implausible that they would find any sort of "piracy is harmful" effect for any other category, which the article seems to say they did for "recent top films".

How would you control for that in a real sense? Often "we controlled for" means we made some pretty big logical leaps that we justified with statistical handwaving in my experience.

These considerations are usually elaborated at length in the studies. And usually take more things into account that what people think about in the first 5-50 minutes after hearing about the study.

That said a lot of studies are crap, maybe the conceptual framework is sound, but they botched the mathematical parts (the stats handwaving), or the sample size is too small, so even if the math is beautiful, the study is meaningless.

Now, for these data from the real world studies the controls are the differences between individual games/movies/albums. Because there are games that take more time to upload (because they take more time to crack, or the game publisher aggressively started to shut down torrent trackers). For movies and albums I don't know what kind of controls they came up with, but they can look at IP addresses of big torrent swarms and asking film studios for marketing spending data and then later cinemas for seats sold data, and try to look at the signals. (Did downloads with a lot of IP addresses from a state had an affect on cinema tickets sold in that state? Is there a per movie difference? Is there a common cause variable - they can try to control with DVD/Blueray/video-on-demand sales.)

If that were the cause it wouldn't be unique to games.

There's little difference between piracy and the demo/shareware model that is common in gaming, the pirated version often lacks updates and online play leading a fan to buy the game.

Getting the feeling almost every news site does not accurately report on this for the sake of click bait.

I doubt "Report finds no conclusive results for pirated digital goods" would raise that much attention.

Yes and and IMO that's OK when it's about iPhone X's cost but not OK when breaking news about policy maker corruption.

I would agree but at this point also warn to not indicate policy maker corruption since - just as for digital goods piracy - there was no conclusive evidence presented for corruption in EU at this point. ;-)