Slashdot Mirror
Lies, Damned Lies, and the UK Copyright Industry
artg writes "Ben Goldacre writes about invalid and misleading 'science' in the Guardian. Here's
his report on the statistics behind a recent press story that reported illegal downloading to involve 120 billion pounds worth of material."
Full article is posted on Ben's blog at http://www.badscience.net/2009/06/home-taping-didnt-kill-music/ (sorry Ben for the slashdotting) - the guardian tends to remove bits of his writing in print/on their website (for space reasons I assume).
The comments to TFA (I guess I'm not a real ./er either) include links to a properly rigorous academic study (and some news articles) that shows that downloaders spend more money, not less: for every CD downloaded, they buy 0.4 additional CDs. The study's authors also "find evidence that purchases of other forms of entertainment such as cinema and concert tickets, and video games tend to increase with music purchases."
http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/eng/ip01457.html
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/03/6418.ars
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4718249.stm
Classic coup de grâce in the article: "Like I said: as far as I'm concerned, everything from this industry is false, until proven otherwise." Why are industry statistics still endlessly repeated in the media? It makes you wonder what market the newspapers using these fabricated stats are aiming for, because the majority of filesharers would laugh into their porridge at the thought of buying every film, track and OS they downloaded!
Yes, but since there's no way of knowing how much was actually illegal material in the first place, we have no way of knowing how to weight that remaining 1%. Since there are non-zero legal downloads (no matter how few), the real figure must be strictly less than this by an unquantifiable amount.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That was actually altered after the story was posted. The original summary said "120 billion pounds of material"
The Guardian tends to edit his pieces a bit when they put them up. If you look at his blog post on badscience.net containing the original version you'll see that sentence links to another Guardian piece about a study showing that people who download more also buy more music - he's quoting from that rather than making it up...
http://www.badscience.net/2009/06/home-taping-didnt-kill-music/ has the original and you'll see it links to http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music
Poor form of the Guardian to remove that link.
Ben Goldacre also makes up some facts, like this one "...for example, people who download more also buy more music."
No, you're wrong.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4718249.stm
People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests. Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans.
Depending on where you are in the world shit can be quite easily acquired. For instance here in Denmark it is quite expensive to keep it around since there all sorts of rules and regulations, so the farmers in Jutland are more than happy to give shit away for free - so his analogy is one of the more insightful I've read around here in a long time.
What other music fans?
Its those who are not "regular downloaders of unlicensed music", obviously.
When the answer to your question is given in the sentence you quoted, I know you're either a troll, or incapable of understanding English.
That is only correct if you gain the electrons, which you don't. It is a circuit. For every electron that flows to you, one of yours flows out. Because if it didn't, charge would build up and eventually result in a very large lightning strike between the sender and receiver. Which, as much as the **AA's would like this to happen, it doesn't.
Furthermore, signaling is by AC signals so the vast majority of the electrons don't even make it to you. Further-furthermore, if wifi is being used anywhere in the process, there is no transfer of electrons at all. Theirs merely wiggle, which causes yours to wiggle.
Which means you got it all wrong.
However, there *is* a transfer of energy. Which, by E=mc^2, implies there is a transfer of mass.
Suppose you download your file using wifi. The typical wifi transmitter output has 32mW of power. The received power is much, much less than this, by factors of tens of thousands or more. So it can be ignored - the mass loss just by transmitting ack's swamps any mass gain of receiving the packets.
Suppose further that you're operating at 54mbit/s. Each bit then carries 32mW / (54*10^6 s) ~= 6*10^-10 joules ~= 3.7 GeV of energy. This is very nearly 4 times the mass of a proton!
So forget electrons, we're effectively losing multiple *protons* worth of mass with every bit of information we exchange. And since everyone transmits a stronger signal than they receive, *everyone* loses mass. There are no winners here. At least with stealing, someone's loss is your gain. But with P2P, everyone loses, throwing mass away in all directions and making a mess of the universe. And that is why there is such a backlash against this technology by some companies.
Exactly - this is basically the parable of the broken window. Also see: http://notnews.today.com/2009/06/06/downloading-keeping-billions-inside-the-uk/ .
Of course, I'm not surprised that the RIAA twist the truth, but to hear Government advisers falling for the fallacy? Either they are ignorant of basic economics, or they are intentionally being deceitful on economic matters. Either way, it's no wonder the economy is going down the tubes.
Actually, they added up all the bittorrent users on one file in the afternoon, waved some magic fairly dust to extrapolate that to everyone for a year, multiplied the figure by £25 as the 'average' price per file, and then multipled *that* figure by 10 (from £12 billion to £120 billion) in the press release by accident, then quietly changed it when challenged by a BBC reporter. Not that they issued a retraction.
It's such a useless figure for anything it's laughable. Well, apart from whipping up a moral panic in the government so they pass yet more draconian legislation forcing ISPs to act as some sort of panopticon against their own userbase at their own cost. I'm sure it's pretty good at that.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
You're both dumb; I run after airplanes and save a bundle (and don't have to wait for hours getting strip-searched).
Kids these days. What do you learn in school?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling#Anglo-Saxon
No, the pound coin in its current form hasn't been around for more than a few decades. But the pound as a monetary unit is more than a thousand years old and did indeed represent the value of one pound of silver. The first coin to to be worth this much was, afaik, the Sovereign which was introduced in the late fifteenth century.
What's your definition of "very long"?
May we live long and die out