Entertainment For Lively Minds
Spinning government stats
A few weeks ago, the government announced its intention to introduce new methods to manage illegal file sharing and downloading. This was based on research that discovered that 7m people in the UK are illegally using file sharing software. The proposal includes new laws to cut off, or slow, the internet connections of those who are found to be illegally file sharing.
The logic behind the calculation of the 7m figure is great. A survey asked 1,176 net-connected households if they used file-sharing software, 136 people said yes, that's 11.6%. They then assumed all file sharing is illegal...and 11.6% was adjusted up to 16.3% to compensate for lies.
They then made an estimate of how many people in the UK are on the internet - 40m (although Government stats for 2008 say 33.9m).
16.3% of 40m = 6.52m. Lets round that up to 7m. OK we can change a law based on that.
http://www.pcpro.co.UK/news/351331/how-UK-government-spun-136-people-int...
There's got to be a more accurate way hasn't there??
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I'm sure that stats are neither here nor there
The questions are:
* Does this government have the will to introduce a law compelling the ISPs to act?
* Supposing they do, who's going to enforce it?
There's an instructive parallel here. It is now clearly against the law to use your mobile phone while driving. This is an activity that most right-thinking people abhor. Now go for a short walk near your home and office. Tell me how many drivers are still doing it and how many policemen you see flagging them down.
Nicely put.
I could extend the analogy to include drivers who pass through our village at speeds in excess of 30 mph.
Sadly, the crime of speeding in a 30 mph zone is deemed a lesser evil than downloading the odd torrent*.
Law already exists to cover the gormless driver, it doesn't exist, and nor can it, to cover the dodgy file sharer, but there seems to be plenty of intent to invent and pass one. Theft of property, as ever, is given more weight than threat to life and limb.
*We could do something about the speeding drivers, of course. Snipers.
The law of diminishing returns
Government seems to want to fix everything despite the fact that it clearly cannot. The focus on file sharing is clear evidence that the music industry (and film for that matter) has got its lobbying act together.
No one has ever died from file sharing. There should be no difference in the way government deals with the music industry having to reflect technological change than that of canal men, telephone operators or household help. And I don't recall reading of a vacuum cleaner levy to help displaced cleaners.
Also, surely the point is that musicians will, in the future, have to work harder than releasing an album every 2 years in order to make a living? Gigging regularly for one. Makes it sound a little like a job I reckon.
Ben Goldacre did a similar demolition job a few months back
...in the Guardian, on claims about lost revenue from the creative industries through illegal downloading.
'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.'
More here.
New Labour - Accurate??
Ha bloody ha.
Don't be silly,
they're all as bad as each other.
See also - More or Less
More or Less covered this a couple of weeks ago, with "The FT's Undercover Economist" Tim Harford
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/more_or_less/8234117.stm
Adam and Joe
Adam and Joe did a couple of songs about this subject, very good. Adam's is on youtube:
(Mp3s of both here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamandjoe/2009/08/pirates-of-the-airwaves.sh... )
Dodgy statistics?
Keith Waterhouse always used to go on about the National Guesswork Authority and, of course, all estimates have to be taken with a pinch of salt. But isn’t 1,000-plus quite a sound sample statistically? And, although they’ve factored in a certain amount of lying (because the respondent doesn’t want to admit to something illegal) they don‘t seem to have taken account of the fact that it‘s the adults of the household that will be responding, not the kids. A friend of my daughter was round yesterday and she was showing me her i-pod with 1800 songs on it. I asked her whether they were paid for or stolen. “Oh, mostly stolen” she blithely - indeed rather proudly - replied. But I bet I know what her Dad would have said if he’d been answering that survey. And he probably wouldn’t have been aware that he wasn’t telling the truth. It’s silly to pretend illegal downloading isn’t widespread and likely to get more so as us fuddy-duddy generations who do it less are superceded by the generation that doesn’t think twice about it, any more than we thought twice about home taping.
Whether any law could change things or not I’ve no idea.
Can I just point out that
the BBC iPlayer service went live in 2007. Anyone using it at that time was using file-sharing technology.
The same was then true of the Channel4 4oD service (and may still be, for all I know. The BBC iPlayer no longer uses a P2P client).
As the quoted survey took place in 2008, all or most of the 176 positive respondents to the question about the use of file sharing software could easily have been users of iPlayer or 4oD or both.
There are lots of other legitimate file sharing services out there.
The most outrageous single distortion in these 'statistics' is the asssumption that the 11.6 % responding positively to that specific question were all engaged in ILLEGAL file sharing.
These are not statistics, they are damned lies.