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MPAA Piracy Survey - Junk Research
Cpt_Corelli writes "Alwayson network claims that a recent survey conducted by Online Testing Exchange (OTX) and distributed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is crap. The MPAA's summary of the survey claims, among other hard-to-believe assertions, that 'about one in four Internet users have downloaded a movie.' (It turns out this isn't true, but this is the factoid that was heard around the world the following week.) When did you stop trusting sponsored 'research'?"
Somebody needs to slap them around and make them quit bitching.
Wow, after research like that, I'd better take up smoking Winstons!
Maybe they took the number of movies downloaded and divided by the number of internet users? Wait, no, the stat would then be 'about every Internet user has downloaded 10 movies.'
(didn't rtfa)
claims like this would work against them. They should be trying to convince the public that they're only against this "band" of pirates which is trying to harm the innocent population and ofcourse CHILDREN by their misdeeds.
By claiming that 1 in 4 internet users have committed a "crime", they'll (hopefully) make the Avg Joe realize that the "filthy" pirates are actually the next door Avg Smith or even the beautiful chick across the street being chased down and convicted in court.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
In order to stay "qualified" for these surveys and, in the end, get paid, many users will answer "yes" to every question that may lead to more questions. Internet surveys CAN be useful for market research purposes, but only when the respondents are confident that their answers won't effect their compensation rate.
If a survey will pay you $10 if you're a beekeeper and answer beekeeping questions, many people will claim to be beekeepers. Who's stopping them?
It's up to individuals to know enough about statistics in order to spot con jobs, much a kin to people knowing something about cars before taking theirs to a mechanic.
In both cases people are simply too lazy to care to learn.
I'm fairly young, and learned in school sponsored research by the Tabaco Companies saying smoking is good for you way back when.
And I always love that 95.43% of statistics are made up on the spot, 64.29% of statistics are distorted to bring about a baised conclusion, and 139.75% of both these types of statistics just don't add up.
I assume that everyone knows that the MPAA and movie studios are planning on starting to sue movie uploaders/downloaders starting in about 1 month (they were on 60 minutes a few days ago with a lot of propaganda).
All we have to do to stop these lawsuits by the RIAA is organize to protest the lawsuits. Unlike the music business, much of the movie business is vulnerable to protests and grassroots activism. THis is because a lot of the money from movies is derived from box office receipts at the multiplex cinemas, which pack in thousands of people each day. Thus, their main revenue source is quite concentrated. A few well-placed protest signs will lose them money every day. Typically, these multiplexes are on a freeway offramp. Two or three good signs placed strategically with a good message will cost them money.
See the freeway blogger at http://www.freewayblogger.com for more ideas on this technique....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
hey, if 1 in 4 people have illegally downloaded music, thats a nice voting demographic for some politician. i should run on a pro-p2p pro-tech platform. who's with me!
www.gaian-mind.org - eco-punk/crust coop and collective | www.anarchistfederation.org - so cal anarchist federation
Well to be fair, I bought a pirate copy of Catwoman in Hong Kong: my wife and watched and stopped half way through. What a pile of shit!
We would have gone and wasted our cash seeing it in the cinema (and walking out half way through) so in a sense piracy did cost the picture makers. But it saved us from wasting our time on some shit.
"I, Robot" now is the exact opposite. Having heard rumours etc about it we weren't going to see it. Having watched it and thoroughly enjoyed it on the pirate copy, again bought openly in a Hong Kong street market, we're planning to see it in the cinema. In that case piracy has had actually made the film maker's money!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Let's not forget:
c) what personal agenda they may or may not be pushing.
Here's an example of c) in action. Back in the '80's a group of scientists used a very in-depth, well-funded study to 'prove' that women in their 20's had healthier babies than women in their teens, and therefore teen pregnancy was a Bad Thing(TM). Not for any 'moral' reason, mind you, but because it was clear that becoming pregnant as a teenager put your child at unnecessary risk, when you could wait until your 20's and avoid that risk.
This research was so well-received by both the left and the right that it held for nearly two decades without being disputed. In fact, it wasn't disproven until last year.
You see, it turns out that the researchers in this case had a strong interest in proving that teen pregnancy was a bad thing, because they personally thought that teen girls having sex was morally reprehensible. In order to cook their results they decided not to control for one very important factor: pre-natal care. That's right, they deliberately did not control for pre-natal care. It's a well-known fact that women in their twenties are far more likely to plan their pregnancies than women in their teens, and so tend to have much better pre-natal care, so this action wasn't accidental but deliberate.
What happens when you control for pre-natal care? What happens is that you piss off a lot of morally conservative people, because controlling for pre-natal care shows that the healthiest babies in the world are born to women between the ages of *13 and 17*. Not exactly something you want to advertise if you're one of the folks screaming about the 'evils' of teen sex.
Needless to say the study was blasted. Not the science of it, which was solid, but on 'moral' grounds, with people claiming it should never have been done in the first place.
So you not only have to ask "who paid for the research" and "who do the researchers work for", but also "do they have a personal agenda they're trying to foist on others using pseudo-science"?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Way back in the good ol days, Congress decided Americans didn't need to drink alcohol anymore and forbade it. Actually changed the Constitution! Did that stop it from happening? No. Eventually, they amended the Constitution again to repeal their stupidity. The American people had spoken. They were going to have their booze no matter what the govornment decided was best for them.
Now, we have a similar situation. The People either do not care about patent and/or copyright violations, or are actively against them. The only people who advocate our current patent and copyright catastrophies are those trying to make a quick buck. (I throw both patents and copyrights out there, because those running linux kernels right now who read slashdot know there are patent violations in the kernel, yet are using it anyway, and I'd say 99% of us will continue to do so until they pry the keyboards from our cold dead fingers, no matter who thinks they own it. And for copyrights, go ahead and delete all that porn on your harddrives, because odds are very good you do not own the rights to have it. No? Didn't think so. Same goes for most music, ebooks, whatever.)
The point is, the People have spoken on this issue. They have said, "Copyrights and patents have the sole purpose of protecting the little guy from the big guy. Not the big guy from the next big guy and not the big guy from the little guy. It's purpose is not to help big companies enforce a monopoly on consumers."
Any politician who advocates persecution of fileswapping or using patents by the people(that's the purpose of having a patent system at all) does not deserve his office. Don't vote for them. Because they are not listening to what the People are saying.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
Someone should start a company that does independant verification of such studies and statistics. It could be payed for with a flat rate for everybody who wants to certify the clear-and-accurateness of their study and be rated with gold stars on the company's report card. Sort of like what the BBB does but just to clear up all of this Microsoft, (R&M)PAA, SCO, etc. 'independant study' business can be somewhat legitimized.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Deciding if something is wrong or right should not depend on laws.
Ideally, the law should codify what is right and wrong, in as many cases as possible (there will always be exceptions). So while it should not depend on the law, it should certainly be reflected by the law.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I've taken part in plenty of consumer surveys. It's a quick way to earn some cash. If I answer truthfully I'm usually not chosen. I think lying goes into both sides. You say Gallup weeds out questions to make them unbiased, and the 20+ surveys I've taken work that way, but the people taking the surveys are chosen according to sponsors.
One examples: "We'll offer you $60 to show up and take the 45 minute survey. What radion stations do you listen to?" If I answer KDVS, the local college station they say, "Sorry, that doesn't qualify. Do you ever listen to one of the "major" area stations?" and they tell you an acceptable answer. That one gets the money, and people learn to answer questions in a way that gets you money.
You don't drink Pabst, you drink Budweiser. You don't ride a 1968 Monkey Wards (Benelli) motorcycle, you drive a 1998 Honda Accord. You don't subscribe to Giant Robot, it's Sports Illustrated. I know lots of people that answer these surveys the same way.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
When did you stop trusting sponsored 'research'?
When I started doing it.
Actually, as I started my Ph.D., someone I knew completed his. At the party we held after his defense, he said something that has stuck with me:
True story.No -- because there's no margin in it.
You certainly don't have a clue. The margin for those living off of government grants is a) reputation, and b) *the ability to get future grants*. It can be very dangerous to do a study which contradicts government policy; it might be impossible from that point on to get any funding at all.
My wife is a scientist, living off of government grants. I have an insider's view on the process (not to mention my own time with government) and it isn't the clean, unbiased pursuit of science that you seem to claim.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I agree with another response to your post. Someone has to pay for research, and sometimes an impartial study just isn't feasible because impartial people have no stake or interest in the outcome.
For instance, I'm personally in a group that has a particular interest in reducing the amount of light pollution that's produced by populated areas. There's little or no existing interest outside of our own group. About the only way we'd be able to get the attention of city planners and legislators is to produce our own study about the positive effects that more efficient and lower levels of lighting might have on safety and crime and so on, counter-intuitive to most people.
If such a study was simply thrown out by others on the grounds that we might be biased, it'd be extremely frustrating. If everyone took that approach, it would be difficult for anyone to argue anything. It would make much more sense and be more productive if people would simply argue with us based on the objective information that we provide with the study, and if necessary point out any flaws in our methodology.
This way we can either prove to people that we're right, accept that we're wrong, or go back and improve our methodology for another attempt. Perhaps it would be decided that the results we've presented aren't even important enough to warrant a change, but at least everyone knows where they stand based on honest, objective information.
You should accept research on its merits based on the information presented. If relevant information is missing, or if what's available shows that a sponsor is hiding or manipulating information to skew the results, then point it out and treat it accordingly. But please don't simply throw it out because it supports the view of whomever sponsored it.
Connection speed:
I think at least one in four internet users use dial-up. At least. So to download a movie would take at least 50 hours on a good connection.
Demographics
So one in four is using Kazaa, BitTorrent, or similar, and knows about divx/xvid codecs, etc? Grandma on jetstream? It appears that a larger proportion of users don't even know not to open dodgy email attachments, or how to patch their OS, let alone find, download and play a movie.
If you read the Yahoo page at http://yahoo.pcworld.com/yahoo/article/0,aid,11579 3,00.asp then you will see the statistic is "The research reveals 37 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have downloaded a full-length motion picture from the Internet."
Also "24 percent of respondents reported that they had downloaded a movie online".
The 24% includes perfectly free-to-download stuff shorts like http://pocketmovies.net/ and http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php
The 37%, being 'full length' is presumably meant to imply Hollywood releases, but can still include public domain stuff like the Prelinger material linked above, which includes full length movies.
It does piss me off that the MPA tries to associate every movie download as being of their copyrighted property; that's not so.
wouldnt a statistic of "one in four" people having downloaded a movie illegally merely discredit the MPAA and warn legislators that they need to wise up and make sure that laws make sense? Any time 25% of the population is guilty of something, it's time to re-think your definition of a crime.
So why would the MPAA lie about this? To purposely make themselves look less credible?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
You know, it's great fun to point out how the statistics are a lie, but what if they are true?
In a land with a government that rules by the people and for the people, is it really a good idea to condemn 1/4 of your population? At what point does the will of the people enter into the equation? Whether it's right or wrong is irrelevant, but whether it's the will of the people or not is the key question.
So, if the statistics are lie, then great, the MPAA is wrong.
If they're the truth, then the MPAA is still wrong.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Hell yeah! For my whole marriage I've been telling my wife the TV is a waste of time. Then one day, sitting there with hundreds of channels, she just got sick of it. The kids didn't know what to do without the TV on, they had forgotten how to play. And she couldn't find anything worthwhile to watch.
So she unplugged the tv, took it outside and stuck it in the dumpster (not quite as dramatic as me throwing a TV in the dumpster from a third story balcony, but still nice to see). She hasn't watched TV in two years and she's happy about it. (I, on the other hand, haven't watched TV in something like 6+ years, so she's seeing a lot more of me now than ever before)
The main problem with TV, I think, isn't necessarily the shitty content. It's the excessive compulsive viewing that causes trouble. When you watch TV, you sit in one place (generally), and stimulation is poured into you. You keep your eyes open and you listen, and you don't do anything else. So there's no effort involved while the stuff just gets poured into you. Since there's no effort involved, there's very little benefit derived. The real benefit comes when you think about it later, or you talk it over with people. But if you're watching it all the time, there isn't any time to go derive any real benefit from watching! So you keep getting this stuff poured into you. Eventually it displaces whatever individuality you had until your entire identity is defined by the TV shows you watch and no longer exists independent of the TV.
Lucky you.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Do you really want the state deciding for you what's right and wrong? Most people would say no to that.
Many of us believe that rather than attempt to be the arbiter of what's right and wrong, a more appropriate role for the law is to attempt to establish a reasonably stable and just baseline for society and to allow people's decisions about what's right and wrong to be informed by their own sense of morality and society's notions of propriety.
Actually, many theaters will give you your money back if you walk out in the first half or less and ask the manager to reimburse you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The issue is we are in danger of reaching a point like we did around 1982 where virtually nobody purchased software for the Apple ][ any longer - they just copied it. It was commonly believed by people in the software industry that any new game would sell two copies - one on the east coast and one on the west coast and everyone would then get copies from the myriad BBS systems. Needless to say, nobody was much interested in producing new games (or anything else) for the Apple ][. Console games (cartridges - much harder to copy) were the thing then, until the PC Jr. failed and triggered another mini-crash.
Downloading software from a BBS in 1982 was difficult and time consuming. Downloading a song on the Internet is quick and painless. Downloading a movie is still not quick and painless for most of the Internet users, but it could get to be there.
Where are we when the artists and music producers reach the conclusion that making a CD just isn't worthwhile anymore and that $100 concert tickets are the only way to go. Paid appearances. Sponsorships like Brittny Spears with Pepsi?. Make the music "scarce" again and keep it out of the hands of the "common people" so it is worth something again.
That is already happening in China with like a 98% piracy rate. How long until it happens here if things continue as they are?
Nothing wrong with socialism.. Unless you're a rich, in-power type of person who doesn't like the idea of being equal with others.
you can go to the Apple site and download trailers from upcoming big-time movie releases. My daughter does this all the time to see if a movie will be worth going to see.
Depending on the way they ask the question, this might have gotten her lumped in with people downloading movies, because she did technically download part of a movie.
The thing was that it was (a) Not the whole movie (b) entirely legal.
Now lets say 10% of all teens do this...Might that inflate the stats just a bit?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
ever since the Regan administration faked a commercial that showed a brainscan of a normal adult and a brainscan of a Cannabis user. The commercial showed a lively colored brainscan for the normal adult, and the one for the Cannabis user was all dull and dark. As it turns out, the brainscan of the supposed Cannabis user was actually from a patient who was comatose. There have been other "studies" regarding MDMA and it's affects on the brain that have recently been uncovered as bogus misinformation from the federal government. I don't use MDMA, but I for one would rather be told the truth about "drugs" and be allowed to make up my own mind as to whether I want to use it or not.
[T]he survey claims, among other hard-to-believe assertions, that 'about one in four Internet users have downloaded a movie.'
That's really not that hard to believe, considering they're talking about an average. The average human being is (roughly) 1/2 male and 1/2 female. All it takes for this "hard-to-believe assertion" to be true is for one user in a hundred to have downloaded 400 movies, something which I wholeheartedly believe from firsthand experience.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I guess they must be counting every type of 'movie' in existance on the internet. As if I remember last week's stories correctly, 49% of internet users in the U.S. are still on dialup. Or are we supposed pick between the notion that half of all broadband user have downloaded a movie or one in four dialup users have?
Good points about data being ignored if it doesn't fit the agenda. I'd guess that they also failed to control for substance abuse that can impact the fetus -- which is likely far higher among pregnant teens than among pregnant adults (if only because rebellious teens do such things, often without a thought for tomorrow).
Back to the nominal topic -- recently I received a survey from a normally-reputable consumer survey company (I've been doing their surveys for 27+ years, so I'm very familiar with them) which essentially cataloged everything on my main computer. We were assured that the data collected would not deliberately contain any personally identifiable information. Well, the output is an XML file, so I gave it a look -- and yeah, it doesn't exactly say who you are, but crosschecking against Google would very likely produce positive IDs for a lot of respondents (and most definitely would for myself).
I very much doubt that the survey company is aware of this, but it's obvious to me that the survey company did not design this survey -- it appears to be of **AA origin, given the types of filenames it recorded in the output file.
Surveys can be screwed up in other ways, too, that can severely impact the data. Frex, a while back I took one regarding what browsers you prefer -- and when I got to the end, discovered that the SUBMIT function would only work in IE6. Erm, doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Actually, that's not the case. Those rights are built on Judeo-Christian concepts of morals. Many, but not all, of our laws are built on those rights and morals. Greatly different cultures may have substantially different ideas of what is more and immoral, and their laws reflect that. Take a look at Islamic Sharia law for a good example of this.
A poster a few replies down advances the idea that not all of our laws are based on ethics, and cites seatbelt laws as an example, with the justification for them being that it unfairly burdens the emergency response system. The argument seems to be that this is based on pragmatics rather than ethics, but we can also argue that it's based on ethics/morals, because another motivation of the seatbelt law is that it unfairly burdens the taxpayers standing behind the emergency response and emergency medical systems to have to care for someone who drives without a seatbelt and is thereby much more seriously injured than he would otherwise be in an accident. That is, it's immoral/unethical/unfair to put the burden of your carelessness on society as a whole. Another way to address the situation would be for emergency crews to arrive at the scene, find you weren't wearing your seatbelt, then just pack up and drive away. Or to rescue you and take you to the hospital, but to bill you and/or your family for the full cost of the rescue.
Those measures are, of course, quite harsh and society would likely deem them unethical as well, so the compromise is to have mandatory seatbelt use laws and an enforcement mechanism for them (being fined if you are caught).
The same poster does have a good argument for pragmatics in the case of it not being illegal to lie to your mother, even though society generally considers that to be unethical. There is no such law at least in part because it would be utterly unenforceable, and even if it were enforceable, it would so clog the court system as to cause it to break down and be unable to handle serious crimes. Thus, society sometimes pragmatically judges that something which is unetihical or immoral ought not to be illegal because the law would be utterly unenforceable.
When did you stop trusting sponsored 'research'?
Ooh, I know this one! Is it when Dr. Nancy Olivieri tested a drug on patients only to find out it may actually be hamful? After the doctor decided to tell the patients the risks, a gag order was issued by the company funding the experiment.
The problem is with the definition of "true statistics". There are a few cases where relatively objective statistics are possible and common. But these are by far the minority, and are seldom the interesting issues.
Let me give an example. Say, how big a part of GDP a government allocates to healthcare. Assume that all statistics are perfectly collected, there are no errors whatsoever in how the data are collected . A "true statistic" no ?
http://www.globalis.no/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=1 42&year=2001
Look at Germany. 0.8% less that ALL but 5 other countries, all the others being countries in the category "Afghanistan", "Nigeria" and so on.
The real reason ?
Let's compare to Norway. For a typical person in Norway, there's maybe 35% taxes. of those, the state gives out around 1/3rd, so 12% of your gross for healthcare.
In Germany, there's instead maybe a 20% tax plus a MANDATORY (by law) "healthcare insurance" that costs something like 14% of your gross.
End result, the statistics say that Germany pays only 0.8% of GDP for healthcare, only 1/8th that of Norway, while in REALITY the typical German pays around 15% (14% + 0.8%) of his gross for healthcare compared to 12% in Norway.
What difference does it make if the subtraction from your salary is labeled "taxes" or "health-insurance" when in both cases you are required by law to pay it, and in both cases the money goes to pay for the very same thing ?
This sort of thing is not the exception when it comes to gathering and using statistics, it's more the rule.