<nettime> Ben Goldacre: Illegal downloads and dodgy figures (Guardian)

["Patrice Riemens" <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Bwo Commons-Law list/ Pranesh Prakash


An excellent piece by Ben Goldacre tracing the damned lies and
statistics behind the recent spate of music piracy figures in the UK.

<http://bit.ly/ZRRuP>

Series: Bad science
Illegal downloads and dodgy figures
Ben Goldacre
guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 June 2009 23.09 BST

You are killing our creative industries. "Downloading costs billions,"
said the Sun. "MORE than 7 million Brits use illegal downloading sites
that cost the economy billions of pounds, government advisers said
today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download
site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn
worth of material."

That's about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily Mail was worried
too: "The network had 1.3 million users sharing files online at midday
on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one file per day, this
would amount to 4.73bn items being consumed for free every year." Now
I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a
lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that every download
is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy
more music. I'd like more details.

So where do these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come
from? I found the original report. It was written by some academics
you can hire in a unit at UCL called Ciber, the Centre for Information
Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (which "seeks to inform by
countering idle speculation and uninformed opinion with the facts").
The report was commissioned by a government body called Sabip, the
Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. On the billions
lost it says: "Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include
all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or
counterfeited, reach £10bn (IP rights, 2004), conservatively, as our
figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs."

What is the origin of this conservative figure? I hunted down the
full Ciber documents, found the references section, and followed the
web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal
firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This
press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a
one-page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up
an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed
"background", among five other points, it says: "Rights owners have
estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK
economy £10bn and 4,000 jobs." An industry estimate, as an aside, in a
press release. Genius.

But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of
it revolved around the figure of 4.73bn items downloaded each year,
worth £120bn. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3,
ebook, is worth about £25. This already seems rather high. I am not
an economist, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for
someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental
value, not the sale value.

In any case, that's £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being
spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the
economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids,
or students, and even if not, that's still about a third of the
average UK wage. Before tax.

Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473m items and £12bn
(so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the
original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them
quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist.

I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error,
which exaggerated their findings by a factor of 10 and were reported
around the world. Sabip refused to answer questions in emails,
insisted on a phone call, told me that they had taken steps but
wouldn't say what and explained something about how they couldn't
be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after 10
minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the call was off the
record. I think it's OK to be confused and disappointed by this. Like
I said: as far as I'm concerned, everything from this industry is
false, until proven otherwise.


-- 
Pranesh Prakash
Programme Manager
Centre for Internet and Society
W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283

_______________________________________________
commons-law mailing list
commons-law@sarai.net
https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law





#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org