MPAA Botched Study On College Downloading

An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press reports that in a 2005 study the MPAA conducted through an outfit called LEK, the movie trade association vastly overestimated how much college students engage in illegal movie downloading. Instead of '44 percent of the industry's domestic losses' owing to their piracy, it's 15 percent — and one expert is quoted as saying even that number is way too high. Dan 'Sammy' Glickman's gang admitted to the mishap, blaming 'human error,' and promised 'immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report.'"

Comments

First impressions

[darkhitman]

Of course they promise they'll look into it now, because it doesn't matter anymore. The mass public will remember that the MPAA loses 44% of its profits to piracy. That it's since been proven incorrect is almost inconsequential, when it comes to public opinion: the mass media won't cover the story twice just for the sake of correctness, and people will buy right into the MPAA's 'accidentally-mistaken' survey's results.

Re:First impressions

[mOdQuArK!]

Bullshit. Copying is not stealing. Copying is _copying_. If you're arguing otherwise, you're arguing from incorrect axioms & any conclusion you reach is pointless.

There's a reason why "Intellectual Property" laws have a whole separate framework of legislation that sets them apart from basic criminal legislation like theft of physical property, and that reason isn't because the legislators thought it would be fun to write the same sorts of laws twice. It's because legislators have to treat the concept of IP protection with a legal rationale which is completely separate from the idea of theft of physical property.

If you want to argue that IP protection is a good thing, then to make any sort of logical headway you're going to have to show (either through logic or empirical evidence) that IP protection provides some sort of net good to the general society. In addition, the issue is so emotionally charged that the argument that "it is obvious" isn't going to fly: you're going to have to provide references to either peer-reviewed economic studies that show a net benefit to society via IP protective-type mechanisms, or references to case studies of comparable societies with and without IP protective-type laws, where an analysis has been done on the relative pros & cons between each society.

Re:First impressions

[Dragonslicer]

Theft means one thing and one thing only: To remove physical property from someone so that they may no longer use it and to keep it in your possession. That's not actually true.

Re:Yeah but...

[WK2]

C'mon... who does the RIAA think they are fooling? (RIAA) retract all your ridiculous claims - or dont bother... the rest of us know the truth - and have for years.

This article is about the MPAA, not the RIAA. It is understandable how you got them mixed up, though. They seem to be molded from the same cloth.

"human error"

[seeker_1us]

Didn't they say something similar when they found out Sadaam had no WMD?

Re:Root cause of this problem would be:

[Alsee]

Actually if you kept reading it was 3% attributed to college campuses (the issue here).

Not to mention that the "losses" figure is entirely fictitious in the first place. 3% of a fiction.

-

Re:It's an AP report that is linked

[mike2R]

Well at the time of writing the AP story is dated at 10 hours old by Google, and there are 113 reprints of it according to Google News Sorted by date with duplicates included (seem to be a couple of non-duplicates on the same topic as well, Ars Technica for example, and this Slashdot story will probably show up at some point).

I'd expect this number to increase but not spectacularly, so I'd say it's getting reasonable coverage but no, it's not set the world on fire or anything.

Re:Yeah but...

[dkleinsc]

They're not just molded from the same cloth, they're both controlled by the same 4 media conglomerates: Disney, GE, AOL Time Warner, and News Corp.