In the wake of a worrying shift towards censorship of the internet, this is sort of comforting. A recent study conducted by the Swiss government has found that illegal downloading doesn’t necessarily negatively impact copyright holders, as many downloaders end up purchasing the products anyway – and “illegal” downloading is therefore remaining legal in Switzerland.

Obviously the entertainment industry has long complained of losses stemming from illegal downloading – and the study was conducted in response to these complains, to determine whether or not the country should change its copyright laws.

Says Torrentfreak (which, yes, obviously has a vested interest in seeing this sort of legislation taken up elsewhere):

The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary.

The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didn’t. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing.

This, along with the cumbersome expensiveness that come with enforcing any bit of internet legislation (France reportedly spent 12 million euros this year alone on pursuing illegal downloaders), and the fact that the UN’s Human Rights Council recently labeled Internet access a human right, led the Swiss to decide that it’s probably okay to download stuff.

And we do like to think of the Swiss as role models.

[Source: Torrentfreak]