While we’re not going to dispute these movie industry commissioned numbers here, it is worth pointing out that at North American box offices a new record has just been broken.

For the first time in history total ticket sales have exceeded $10.7 billion. According to the most recent numbers total revenue this year will be around $10.8 billion, with 6 percent coming from this year’s blockbuster The Avengers.

The new record was set without raising ticket prices, and even when adjusted for inflation there’s a significant bump compared to last year’s grosses. And if that’s not enough, the total number of movies premiered in 2012 also went up to a record breaking 655.

The new record follows an even more stable international trend where box office revenues have been growing for several consecutive years. Over the past decade international grosses nearly tripled from $8.1 billion in 2001 to $22.4 billion in 2011.

Keep in mind that this was the same period that online file-sharing took off.

The good news for Hollywood is that “pirates” are not all that interested in the low quality “camcorded” movie releases that are usually available during the first weeks after a movie premiere.

There aren’t many movie fans who see a camcorded version of a movie as a true alternative to watching a film in a movie theater. The two are totally different experiences, and not direct competition at all.

If anything, downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious.

The suggestion that online piracy may not be all that bad for the box office is in line with two recent academic studies. The first showed that the US box office is not suffering from movie piracy at all, and another one came to the counter-intuitive conclusion that the Megaupload shutdown negatively impacted ticket sales.

But does this mean that piracy is not an issue for the movie industry at all?

Not necessarily. Most “pirates” appear to be waiting for higher quality DVD and Blu-Ray rips which are more likely to affect the DVD-aftermarket and VOD sales. These high quality pirated copies are direct competition and can impact revenues.

The challenge for the movie industry is to make legal offerings more appealing than their pirated counterparts. Of course it may not always be able to “compete with free”, but there is still a lot of ground to make up when it comes to availability and quality of legal offerings.

But overall we’d say that the movie industry is still very much alive.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, a new study reveals that movie industry itself has the key to decreasing piracy, without passing any news laws.

In a paper titled ‘Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales’ researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College examine the link between BitTorrent piracy and box office returns. As hypothesized, they find that international movie piracy losses are directly linked to the delay between US and foreign premieres.

In other words, the longer it takes before a movie is released internationally, the more box office revenues are impacted through piracy.

“We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects. This relationship is much stronger in contexts where piracy is more prevalent: after BitTorrent’s adoption and in heavily pirated genres,” they write.

“Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy.”

Aside from their conclusion that a lack of availability is fueling piracy, the researchers report a perhaps even more interesting result. Contrary to what the MPAA and other lobby groups claim, the study doesn’t find a negative effect of BitTorrent piracy on US box office revenues.

“We do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy,” the researchers write.

The above means that movie pirates in the US wouldn’t have bought a ticket at the box office if file-sharing was nonexistent. Only international box office sales see a piracy related decline in revenue, which is attributed to long release windows, something the industry itself can address.

Yet, the movie industry lobbyists keep hammering on about eliminating pirate sites, while ignoring the fact that the industry itself can make important steps to decrease international piracy as well. Governments around the world are not blind to this double standard, as both the Netherlands and Switzerland chose to keep unauthorized movie downloading legal until the industry improves the availability of legitimate content.

Of course the study is far from perfect as there are many more factors that influence box office returns. However, the findings clearly suggest that the movie industry itself can take the biggest step towards eliminating piracy “losses,” not lawmakers.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.