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."
Intellectual Property Minister David Lammy said the report brought home the impact illegal downloads had on the UK economy as a whole. "If we take as read the music industry's assumption that every download is a lost sale, then billions of pounds are freed up for ordinary people to spend of things of actual economic substance to keep local businesses healthy, rather than chasing phantom pseudo-value from things that have an inherent cost of production of zero. This makes the whole economy more efficient and lets money go where it is actually useful, rather than to Bono's numbered account in the Virgin Islands."
The government says it will be hard to change attitudes to free downloading, particularly from the entrenched old media parasites. "Studies consistently show that downloaders buy more music. We have to stop this and get them downloading dodgy rips from BitTorrent, rather than official high-quality versions from iTunes."
The report also noted that new, faster broadband services could increase file-sharing, which was already more than half of net traffic in the UK. The ISPs modestly declined credit for their part in helping Britain's financial future, noting that it was their customers, the great British public, who had voted with their browsers to do the hard work of keeping the country afloat.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
There's several videos floating around with him too that are definitely worth watching. He is a very sharp mind and it pleases me greatly to see his urgently needed skeptical analysis getting the press coverage it so thoroughly deserves.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I would have to disagree, after all if I can get the music for free, why would anyone ever pay
I can get poo for free as a manure for my Garden.
Why do i go and buy manure, red soil, natural fertilizer and all that crap from Home Depot?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Not to mention those of us that have actually found new shows and bought them thanks to P2P. For example, in the late 90s I hear all this buzz about this new show that is a remake of a bad movie I had seen called Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Supposedly unlike the movie this was actually really good, with good acting and storytelling. But where I lived there was no WB to be had.
So I downloaded a couple of episodes to see if it was any good. I actually enjoyed them and I ended up buying the entire Joss Whedon collection, including the Angel series and Firefly. At $50 a season, for the seven seasons of Buffy, Five of Angel, and one of Firefly you are looking at $650, not including a few collectibles and various promo stuff from the shows that my late sister bought me. All told probably close to $1000 was spent on a show that I never would have bought if it wasn't for P2P, because after seeing the movie I honestly didn't see how they could make it not suck.
I'm sure there are plenty like me, that are happy to buy something we enjoy if we are given fair value, and who for one reason or another don't have access to many of these shows or other entertainment. If I would have saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer boxed sets in a B&M store I never would have given it a second thought if I hadn't gotten to see a couple of episodes on P2P. After all, who would have thought any series based on a Kristie Swanson movie could actually be entertaining?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I downloaded the first season of Smallville about four or five seasons in, not having watched TV since about the end of middle school, watched it straight through on one of my days off, and went to FYE the next day, hit a Buy one get one DVD box sets sale and bought all the seasons that were out on DVD at the time. And while I was there, I picked up Hogan's Heroes, Knight Rider, A-Team, and a stack of others that I can't even remember now, as it was a few years ago. And spent $25 on their savings card, got 20% off my total.
All told, that day I got about $500 in DVDs for $230 or so thanks to BOGO and the card.
Just because I downloaded a season of Smallville.
Assuming only 1k electrons in a bit, then a bit would be 9.10938215(45)x10^-28 kg.
If we then assume that every p2p user downloads at 100kbps, then in 1 second a single user would have acquired 9.10938215(45)x10^-23 kg Assuming there are only 1 billion users in one second 9.10938215(45)x10^-15 kg worth of data would be transfered After approximately 317 years only 9.10938215(45)x10^-5 kg worth of data would have been transfered
I do not see how even one pound of data has been lost.
Of course, by making up unlikely numbers they divert attention from the even more insidious propaganda buried in the claim.
It's not money _lost_, it's money _saved_.
Downloading _saves_ the economy £120 Billion.
The money that doesn't get spent on media doesn't magically disappear. It's spent on other things instead. Jobs aren't lost, in fact, I'd wager the money saved creates more jobs in the local economy than money to the media industry which to a large extent doesn't go towards labour intensive activity, and in many cases simply goes out of the country.
Goldacre could have strengthened his analysis even further by considering the decline in entertainment industry revenue due to competition: not from downloads, but from social change. My parent's generation had no money and few options so they spent a lot of their spare time playing cards and reading books from the public library. In my day, a whole culture had developed around vinyl records, and they were the catalyst for most of a young person's social life. These days, young people spend roughly the same proportion of their disposable income (i.e. most of it) on mobile phone contracts as I used to spend on records/tapes. I can think of no reason to imagine that, if 'free' downloads suddenly stopped existing, people would give up their mobile phones and spend the money on CD/DVDs instead.
Namgge
Suppose therre is some truth in the story the RIAA (don't know if there is). I want to know what genres suffer the most from this "they download instead of buying" sindrome.
If the loss is made on empty pop music songs, then I'd say they weren't worth one eurocent anyway. 15 years ago teenagers bought hypes, not music. Now the hypes are found online. Too bad the music industry doesn't want to follow them online.
If the loss were in more artistic genres (a band named Metallica comes up in my mind), that could actually be seen as a loss. But I guess the music industry will never give us the real figures on this statistic.
Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473m items and £12bn (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist.
When asked why they did not take steps to notify journalists of the error, they first tried to avoid answering, but they
...explained something about how they couldn't be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after 10 minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the call was off the record,
They do sound very trustworthy!
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Well, it's got an interesting mission:
Our mission is to
* Provide strategic, independent and evidence-based advice to Government on intellectual property policy, covering all types of intellectual property rights
It could start by procuring some actual scientific evidence around the economic effects of intellectual 'property'. Research, comparisons, even simulations of various forms of models of systems would be nice. There is plenty of evidence that intellectual 'property' is, in fact, not needed as an incentive, and even counterproductive. If they want to argue they're going to make evidence-based advice, they should turn up some evidence indicating otherwise.
Of course, with this report they've thoroughly proven, as could be expected, that they're just a lobby group posing as a government agency. Big surprise.
Trying to explain the demise of an obsolete business model..
The movie Dark knight cost about 185 million to make and took in a total revenue of over 1billion. Thats more than five times the original investment. Iron Man cost 140 million and made over 500 million. Transformers cost 151 million and made over 700 million. The list goes on.
That does not look like a demise of an industry to me. That looks like bloody good business. You can find similar statistics for music, however its somewhat harder to do. For example black eyed peas "Monkey Business" sold about 300k copies in its first week alone.
I think obsolete does not mean what you think it means.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
indeed. its money for old rope. Absolutely everyone who produces entertianment content is a millioanire and lives in a gold plated house.
No movie, game or tv show ever lost money, and we are all just pretendind that piracy costs people jobs.
In fact, the absolute guarntee of a 500% ROI is a genuine fact, despite the fact that this is in complete contravention of basic high school economics, because if it were true, you, and every other slashdotter would be falling over themselves to start up movie studios.
*sigh*
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
indeed. its money for old rope. Absolutely everyone who produces entertianment content is a millioanire and lives in a gold plated house.
While I can't say I know much about movies, I certainly agree with the sentiment that not all entertainers are millionaires. I would argue however that artists who don't want to be millionaires suffer more from the commercially driven industry than they do from commercial piracy, let alone file sharing (which while accepted as piracy is distinctly non commercial). A lack of cost for distribution evens the playing field between those who market themselves to make millions (and thus afford to spend millions more on marketing) and those who make great music but aren't doing it for the money.
When all is said and done you have an musician and you have a fan. If the fan does not support the musician financially in some way then they would be foolish to expect them to continue producing. People will pay for music if they want to support the musicians.. if they can and don't then they aren't a fan and as such why would the musician care if they got any money from them? If a musician does not have enough fans to support them then why would they feel the need to make a career out of it?
The big issue at the moment is not whether people want to pay for music but the roadblocks big labels are putting in place to stop them supporting their artists directly. They just cannot compete on a level playing field as they are greedy and want to know which should be the next band to invest in where they can be sure of a 500% return on the investment. If actually all artists that people want to listen to get what they deserve then there will be no money left for the middlemen to skim off the top even if they can con the artists into signing a bad contract.
I am willing to pay for a music service that gives me at least as good a service as I can get for free while supporting the artists. There isn't one. I bought the new NOFX album (coaster) off iTunes the other day because I know they get a comparitavely good return on the money I spend. I already had the album in FLAC format for free and to support the artist I had to buy an inferior product because I don't want a CD. Now, if I have to jump through those hoops to support a band who run their own damn label and sing about the death of the music industry.. is it any wonder that people resort to torrents? I'd have rather used a donate button on their website than install iTunes.