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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'?"
Wow, after research like that, I'd better take up smoking Winstons!
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?
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.
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.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