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."

Comments

"pounds of material"

[BadAnalogyGuy]

In Britain, they use "pounds" as a measure of money. That's why "X pounds of material" makes sense in this case.

They aren't talking about the weight of the material, they are talking about its price.

Re:"pounds of material"

[Anonymous Coward]

... Really? Who in this day and age on slashdot did not know that? WOOOOSH

Re:"pounds of material"

[Anonymous Coward]

There was the word "worth" between "pounds" and "of". Next time you want to quote something use copy-paste to get it correct.

Re:"pounds of material"

[__aaclcg7560]

You mean their Internet tubes aren't that big after all?

Re:"pounds of material"

[Anonymous Coward]

That was actually altered after the story was posted. The original summary said "120 billion pounds of material"

Re:"pounds of material"

[Keeper Of Keys]

What you don't realise, though, is that a pound coin actually weighs a pound.

Re:"pounds of material"

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you are trying to be funny cause that statement is about as true as anything the recording industry has to say.

If pound coins actually weighed a pound, everyone would have to go to the gym just to be able to carry enough money to buy a few beers

Re:"pounds of material"

[Lachlan Hunt]

Sure, with today's coinage, a 1 pound coin doesn't weight that much. But, originally, it was based on the value of a pound (mass) of silver.

Re:"pounds of material"

[wgoodman]

not to mention all the elbow bending after they buy said beers..

Re:"pounds of material"

[mcvos]

If pound coins actually weighed a pound, everyone would have to go to the gym just to be able to carry enough money to buy a few beers

Originally (way back in the middle ages or something) a pound was the value of a pound of silver. Because pounds of silver were a bit heavy to carry around, they made them gold coins. The connection with the weight was definitely there, though. (It's devalued a bit since then, I'm afraid.)

Re:"pounds of material"

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Citation please. The pound coin hasnt been in circulation for very long and replaced one pound notes.

Re:"pounds of material"

[Kidbro]

Huh? Citation please. The pound coin hasnt been in circulation for very long and replaced one pound notes.

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"?

Re:"pounds of material"

[Muros]

Indeed, the pound coin has not recently been around for very long, as monetary denominations of any worth were printed on paper, so for a few decades there were pound notes that replaced the old coinage. These have been done away with as a pound is now small change. But go back a bit, and there were coins of various types that were worth a pound or thereabouts, such as the sovereign, worth 1 pound and issued 1489, or the guinea, issued 1663, originally worth 1 pound but fluctuating with gold prices.

Re:"pounds of material"

[Anonymous Coward]

As a matter of fact, "Pound of material coins" have been produced since the Roman Republic ("Aes Grave" was the name)

Re:"pounds of material"

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you are trying to be funny cause that statement is about as true as anything the recording industry has to say.

If pound coins actually weighed a pound, everyone would have to go to the gym just to be able to carry enough money to buy a few beers

Thus, the invention of paper money.

For god's sake

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the scumbags like RIAA gives lies a bad name. Lies keep marriage in tact, family together, friendship, gov't, you name it. Along comes RIAA and ruins lie's good name. Shame.

Re:For god's sake

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny cos its true.

Re:For god's sake

[Ezrymyrh]

And the beat goes on. So be Sonny & Cher with your friends. This news makes me feel Wanted dead or Alive, I say its time to Turn The Page on this bull And Whip It, Whip It in to shape.

Re:For god's sake

[Anonymous Coward]

You're lying!!!

Oh, really?

[G-forze]

Big surprise. Everything that has come from this industry has been at best broad guesstimates, at worst intentionally spread lies. Trying to explain the demise of an obsolete business model without taking the obvious into account is hard!

Re:Oh, really?

[siloko]

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!

Re:Oh, really?

[wisty]

There are bound to be other examples of industry statistics being made up, then propagated through the media, and finally put out in a government policy report.

Remember the housing shortage?

Re:Oh, really?

[Znork]

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.

Re:Oh, really?

[houghi]

It always reminds me of a friend who tells he saved 1EUR by running after the bus instead of taking it. I always say he is an idiot and he should run after a taxi. That way he would save much more.

Re:Oh, really?

[Haeleth]

Oh, indeed. But this particular industry has been putting out nothing but misleading statistics for decades, now, and the policy reports they end up in have produced some of the worst laws ever written, ultimately preventing large numbers of people from doing perfectly legitimate things with products they have bought and paid for.

Now there's a risk that the media industry's lies are going to result in yet another round of laws that further restrict the freedom of law-abiding people, while still doing nothing to halt piracy. It's only right and proper that anyone who values freedom and democracy should be up in arms about this, and should do everything possible to make sure their elected representatives learn the truth and stop taking the media industry's lies at face value.

Re:Oh, really?

[Philip_the_physicist]

The Sun is a Murdoch rag. The question is then not why they publish this nonsense, but how he benefits from doing so.

Re:Oh, really?

[RichardJenkins]

Does he get the bus everyday? If you take a bus almost every day, and then one day you decide to walk instead - it would make sense to talk about the money you saved during those times you decided against taking it.

Re:Oh, really?

[Zumbs]

Except, off cause, that the study were referenced wrong in the press releases. From TFA:

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!

Re:Oh, really?

[noidentity]

It always reminds me of a friend who tells he saved 1EUR by running after the bus instead of taking it. I always say he is an idiot and he should run after a taxi. That way he would save much more.

You're both dumb; I run after airplanes and save a bundle (and don't have to wait for hours getting strip-searched).

Re:Oh, really?

[neokushan]

Surely that's just the same question?

Re:Oh, really?

[shoemilk]

Best. Post. Ever.

Re:Oh, really?

[abigsmurf]

That's a horrible approach to economics and simply isn't true.

Imagine you've a city of 100,000 or so where 90% of people earn their money working at a massive copper or supplying that copper mine. Imagine demand for copper falls by half and they have to cut production (and jobs) by half to remain profitable.

In terms of GDP copper mining may be something like 0.1% and it wouldn't seem like that would have a huge effect if it went down to 0.05% of GDP.

In that town though, there are now 45,000 out of work, people who've only ever known mining or who the mine was their main customer. There isn't any other industry to support these people, they're untrained in other areas and they can't afford to move as their house values have plummeted.

Poverty increases, Crime increases, kids start performing worse at school and the town, without massive external investment, would very quickly become either a ghost town or a slum. The cost to the economy becomes huge either way.

For a stable economy, you not only need the money to be spent, you need to money to be spent in the right areas so you can maintain the various local economies. Look what's happened when people have gone "lets cut back on how much we spend on cars". Sudden, drastic shifts in buying behaviour can have massive consequences, even if people are seemingly spending the same amount of money and it's often not possible for businesses to react fast enough to head these changes off.

Re:Oh, really?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

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.

Re:Oh, really?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Trying to explain the demise of an obsolete business model without taking the obvious into account is hard!

You could start by explaining what alternative you propose, if the current model is "obsolete" and its flaws are "obvious".

You can certainly criticise some of the current pricing, aggressive legal strategies and industry propaganda. However, you can't deny that ultimately, it does cost a lot of money to make movies, software, etc., and that some of these products are valued by a lot of people. Moreover, there has to be some return on investment for those who back the successful projects, because a lot of the others make big losses, and no-one would back a new project if the best it was going to do was break even. This is basic economics, and the fact that the marginal cost of distributing a work can be close to zero in the Internet age is not the whole equation.

Re:Oh, really?

[cliffski]

spoken by someone whose job isnt on the line as people take their work for free, I'm sure...

Re:Oh, really?

[cliffski]

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*

Re:Oh, really?

[cliffski]

I agree 100%, but you will get little support here. The groupthink at slashdot is that content producers are evil scumbags trying to rape everyones daughters.

Apparently we are ignorant, and if we had the common sense of a slashdot geek in his moms basement, we would embrace the new business model of working for free.

Of course, that business model only works in moms basement, which is why its only hailed here on /.

Re:Oh, really?

[vivaelamor]

Yes, also, curse all those efficient IT personnel who do themselves out of a job by making sure you don't need to call them back. After all, they lower the demand and the market shrinks. Never mind the fact that while they will likely go on to work for someone else based on the recommendation of the first customer, those jobsworths in the market who they displace will be forced to re-evaluate their business practices and might actually end up doing more good than harm in the long run.

Personally, I am working in the advice sector atm and all our work is free to those who we advise. I am envious of people who only have to do their work once and can replicate the result without cost. Right now we pretty much make do with leaflets.

Re:Oh, really?

[jamstar7]

1.7 million people downloading Coronation Street? Why bother? I'm not much for Brit soaps. I downloaded a couple once to get my ratio up on The Box, but nobody hooked into me when I seeded them.

Re:Oh, really?

[Artifakt]

Since you can't find anything to disagree with in the facts "abigsmurf" presented, you decide to attack the messenger - guess you just proved everything "abigsmurf" said is true.

Re:Oh, really?

[hitmark]

closed loop vs outside fuel?

Re:Oh, really?

[vivaelamor]

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.

Re:Oh, really?

[tiananmen tank man]

I think you are confused. There is more than one group involved here; there are content producers, content owners, content distributers and consumers.

Over time, technology has made things more effiecient. Things like how you make and distribute copyrigted works. Why is it that you demand longer copyright terms when your job has gotten easier?

Re:Oh, really?

[jthill]

Let's ignore the manipulative changes in that analogy, shall we, and focus on the substantive point. So we'll skip over how you substituted uneducated laborers for college-educated finance and marketing and legal professionals, and put them in a low-income low-mobility location with no comparable alternative means of support anywhere rather than at the centers of the most vibrant and varied cities on the planet, full of enterprises that need related skills.We'll just pass over those in relatively merciful relative silence, 'kay? Let's focus on the real situation.

Once upon a time, media distribution required dedicated bricks and mortar and real estate and special-purpose precision machinery and manufacturing and transport and untold infrastructure and the management competence to orchestrate them all so enough of everything was in all those physical retail outlets in amounts that roughly matched their popularity.

The *AA argument is apparently that all the people who used to be needed to do that should still be paid what their jobs used to be worth for some unspecified length of time after what they do has stopped providing any inherent value at all, even though everyone on the planet with enough brains to breathe saw this coming long ago.

But even that isn't absurd enough for these welfare queens. They don't just want to be paid for nothing, they want to be paid double and triple and ten times the amount. It used to be they got money when that product they worked so hard to manufacture and distribute was bought. Now they want money every time that product is used, even though their marginal effort for each use is the same as it ever was: zero.

From each according to his now- and predictably-worthless means, to each according to his ridiculously- and predictably-inflated needs? Let them get real jobs. Copper's still really valuable; maybe they could work in the copper mines?

Re:Oh, really?

[Artifakt]

I won't pretend to be able to guide the whole of media into a better model, but i will (arroganty) claim I've thought about it enough to have some alternatives for the music part of that industry. First, pricing, especially on older content, needs to come down a lot more than they are willing to accept. Just the fact that we got to a date where most people who were going to replace older media with CDs had already done it, should have caused a price drop. Just the fact that when CDs first came in, the industry promised that prices would come down to where tape and vinyl were, should have caused a price drop (and redoing the standard contracts, as CDs soon stopped counting as an experimental medium). Competition from just legal online downloading should have caused a third price drop. That's all before we even debate if it is ethical to expect them to drop prices to offset free downloading or not. The pressure for those first three price drops exists whether there is a single illegal torrent or not. One reason I agree that the flaws are obvious is that there is nothing the industry can do that is actually aimed at 'pirates' (and not screwing their legitimate consumers and then raping them as taxpayers) which will do anything at all to address those first three problems.
        So when you say we "can certainly criticize some of the current pricing", that's a bit like calling Tyson's ear biting 'unsportsmanlike' - true but a vast understatement. There are very good arguments for much larger price decreases than the industry is willing to even consider, and I, for one, suspect they haven't even looked at projected total profits for prices down in that range in at least the last twenty years or so, and don't actually know whether it would be a possible business model or not. Notice that if there's a legitimate lower price point that would preserve at least a fair margin of profit, it probably would decrease piracy as well - most pirate have some costs, if only for blank CDs or higher bandwidth caps on service, so it becomes a matter of how much is your time worth, etc. and for at least some pirates, that would translate to it being cheaper to buy some things.
        There's probably much more reason now to decrease prices on digital downloads than on CDs, and I suspect there's people here who can make a better argument for it than I would. I'll just say that keeping CD prices high doesn't justify the high price of direct digital to most consumers, and lowering CDs wouldn't make any sense from that perspective either, so the industry is in a damned if they do, damned if the don't gridlock unless per track prices also come down on legal downloading.
        However, there's irrationality involved now - the industry may be crazy enough to spend far more trying to stop piracy than it is worth, trying to rub out every last remaining case, and the pirates may be slow to do what's in their own best interests, having come to literally hate and despise the industry.

      Now film is a somewhat different issue. Cheap sale DVDs of films that either did poorly at the box office or are just a tad older movies are much more common than the audio side of big media. There's probably a bit more honesty in advertising them too, as when a film comes on TV and there's a statement about how it has been modified from the original release. Those seem to be more straightforward than anything the RIAA members use. I could mention old examples of irrational behavior (the financial miss-handling of the original Planet of the Apes series, for one), but let's see if someone who knows the movie industry better will address this point.

Re:Oh, really?

[jthill]

If the *AA's want absolution for pretending distribution costs real money, they're going to have to give absolution for the kids pretending production doesn't.

Or, alternatively, we could just ignore them all, both crowds, and have sane conversations premised on observable fact: production costs real money and entails corporate-level risk, and distribution is, on that scale, virtually free. Somewhere in here everyone's going to have to settle on a business model where the people who do the valuable work (that's creation and production) get returns sufficient to motivate the effort required; the old models are struggling because they piggybacked on the distribution effort.

But if we're going to get to sane-land, this mirror-image pretense, where the *AA's pretend that singing "Happy Birthday" or playing the radio in your taxi-maintenance bay are theft and the children pretend making copies of "The Dark Knight" isn't, is going to have to stop. It doesn't matter any more who started it, everybody's going to need to stop. Me, I think it's kinda incumbent on the grownups to stop first.

Re:Oh, really?

[Scrameustache]

Why are industry statistics still endlessly repeated in the media?

Because that industy owns those medias.

Re:Oh, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to save the economy $10 by shoplifting a CD from Walmart. That money that I would've spent on the media doesn't just disappear - I've still got it! Thus, the economy hasn't suffered at all!

Re:Oh, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I am envious of people who only have to do their work once and can replicate the result without cost.

Do you really believe that people creating software are just sitting on their asses? No, we are not. We are earning reasonable salaries, just like everyone else and working full work-weeks. This idea that we can sell something an infinite number of times is bunk. In fact, the free market stops this from ever happening: if we make money like crazy, it attracts competition, which drives down prices, which forces us into a position where we are making reasonable money for our work.

Re:Oh, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

because if it were true, you, and every other slashdotter would be falling over themselves to start up movie studios.

You know, if I were a billionaire then I think that I'd consider starting a movie studio and could probably expect at least 250% ROI from producing "blockbusters" (including failures).

The rich [have the potential without doing work to] get richer - it's a given in a capitalist system.

Re:Oh, really?

[Hal_Porter]

That's a horrible approach to economics and simply isn't true.

Imagine you've a city of 100,000 or so where 90% of people earn their money working on a massive copper

If 90% of the people in the town were working on a copper, wouldn't the bastard go down? I don't care how massive he is. Big chavs would be kicking and punching him, little chavspawn would jump on him and gnaw and burrow. I reckon the guy would be ex filth pretty quickly.

I saw the Staines massive attack a copper. They're much less than 90% of the town and most of them are under 16 and they're so weeded up they can't run. Didn't take long.

Re:Oh, really?

[Hal_Porter]

There's a lot of money in Uranium mining in North Korea.

Re:Oh, really?

[Hal_Porter]

I think the most important task for bands that sing about the death of the music industry is to develop innovative new forms of distribution to maximize both their fans return on their investment and also their leveraging their own IP holdings. In many ways the task they face is strkingly similar to that faced by skilled professionals in other industries, particularly financial advisers who wish to be self employed following Thatcher's brilliant deregulation of the City in the 80's.

I work as an adviser for several punk bands. I always turn up in a smart designer suit and lecture them on economics. Which they seem appreciative of. However occasionally I've pointed out a few basic economic errors in their lyrics and suggested ways they could improve them without messing up the flow of the song. I also recommended they read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and mentioned an essay by Milton Friedman. And actually I've written a few songs myself, about the economic liberalisation in the 80's and 90's in Chile and China.

For some reason at that point the meeting seemed to become a bit frosty.

Actually to be honest I don't bother to invoice them for the advice. I'm secretely filming the meetings for mockumentary I intend to distribute on the net for free.

Re:Oh, really?

[Philip_the_physicist]

"Why do they publish this nonsense?" implies that the newspaper is doing it for its own benefit, to pander to its readers or to secure more advertising from the copyright industry, or maybe just pure stupidity.

Asking how Sir Rupert benefits from things can be more of a puzzle (his republicanism, for example, might actually be something he believes in, or it could just be a mater of friendship with a particular Australian republican), but in this case I suspect the answer is simply that he thinks that video downloads are hurting Foxtel, by reducing the number of people willing to pay for Cable/satellite TV when they can get the content free and, more importantly, advert free.

Re:Oh, really?

[philgp]

You don't need to add an 's' to media to make it plural - its already plural.

Re:Oh, really?

[philgp]

And, of course, 'its' in my above post should contain an apostrophe.

Re:Oh, really?

[Scrameustache]

And, of course, 'its' in my above post should contain an apostrophe.

Thus is the law of correcting another's grammar ;-)
You're right about the plural of media though... dang. No matter! I stand by my creative pluralization!

Re:Oh, really?

[david_thornley]

Ever studied ancient history? We have very limited direct reports of a whole lot of important things. Moreover, we have strong reason to believe that there's a heck of a lot of misunderstanding and lies in those records. Given that, you'd think that historians would be suspicious of what was written.

Wrong. Any event covered by one source is assumed to have gone more or less according to that source. This assumption can be challenged for individual cases, but it needs to be challenged over and over and over again.

Ever read about the 1.7 million man army Persia invaded Greece with? That is, very simply, impossible. However, there's no other number given by anybody who's something of a contemporary, and so it gets repeated over and over.

So, we've got something of the same thing here. We've got numbers on one side, and a lot of intelligent people saying those numbers are meaningless and wrong and lies on the other. The result is that the media goes with the numbers, because that's something hard and tangible, even when they're dead wrong.

To get the message out, we'd have to provide our own estimates, and make them as easy to use as industry press releases. At that point, news media might decide to go with "estimated variously at about X and about Y", instead of "losses of Y".

Re:Oh, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn to spell. Calm down. And stop pretending that you're clever.

That way, maybe someone will listen to you.

Free tip. You need it.

Take it.

Re:Oh, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah. Thanks for that, almost made up for the news that the BNP have seats in europe now.

Re:Oh, really?

[vivaelamor]

Do you really believe that people creating software are just sitting on their asses?

I am really interested to know the method with which you write software that doesn't involve sitting on your arse.

Besides that, if you are already getting your income through a salary then how would the sales effect you? If the need for developers decreases then that implies copyright was making you do work which was redundant anyway. In a copyright free world it is quite possible that people will lose jobs if they rely on copyright.

I have personally never understood peoples need to do work when there isn't work to do. If there is less of a type of work to do then you either find something else to do or relax. Make-work just ensures everyone is required to work full time no matter how well the economy is doing, which generally leads to mass job cuts as the employer is unable to adapt to change quickly enough.

Full story

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Full story

[deglr6328]

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.

Re:Full story

[gazbo]

Indeed. Which is why I was so disappointed when reading that piece to see that his usual anality seemed to go on holiday when it came to posting links that supported his belief:

I also doubt that every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy more music.

If the music industry (or a quack) had posted a correlation to suggest a particular causative relationship, he'd have torn them a new one. It seems this one gets a free pass because he likes the implication.

Re:Full story

[vectorious]

He does not state that there is a causal relationship, he links to a study showing that there is a correlation and says that in light of this he doubts that it can be shown that every download is lost revenue. The onus of proof is surely on the person who is making the statement, not the one doubting its veracity, and showing data at best inconsistent with the hypothesis that each download is lost revenue.

Re:Full story

[m.ducharme]

There does seem to be a correlation between downloaders and purchasers of CD's and concert tickets though. Geist's blog featured the results of a poll of Canadians that showed that downloaders were also more likely to buy music and pay for concerts. There was a similar poll or study from Scandinavia that showed the same relation.

Now as to the link between causation and correlation, for the statement you quoted to be strictly true, he only needs to find one example of a person who downloaded an album, and then bought the album or a concert ticket specifically because of that download (not every download would then be lost revenue, there would be at least one download that represented increased revenue). I don't think it's unreasonable to make this claim, even if he doesn't have evidence to back it up. It's certainly a more believable claim than the music industries' claim, that downloading always results in lost revenue.

In short, you don't need to have irrefutable evidence to challenge a wild claim, only reason to think that the wild claim is too wild to be true, and I think the correlation between downloaders and music consumers is sufficient in itself. Occam's razor isn't the answer to everything, but it remains a handy tool, for all of that.

Re:Full story

[Blankw]

I'd hope it was for "space reasons", because since when has the media been unbiased and genuinely informative in every aspect?

Doh!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

"Ben Goldacre writes about invalid and misleading 'science' in the Guardian ... behind a recent press story that reported illegal downloading to involve 120 billion pounds worth of material."

Everyone knows bits don't weigh anything!
Those Brits better get with it, the correct unit of measure is LoC - Libraries of Congress!

Re:Doh!

[iamdrscience]

Everyone knows bits don't weigh anything!

How perfectly ridiculous! Every bit in a binary number has a weight. Furthermore, every bit you add doubles the weight, so while a single zero or one may only weigh a little bit, every one you add to that will weigh a bit more. It's very easy to see how these sorts of things could add up.

Re:Doh!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Are you trying to say that even a bit weighs a little bit?

Re:Doh!

[Faylone]

Wait, do Brits use Libraries of Parliament?

Re:Doh!

[tagno25]

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.

Re:Doh!

[sa1lnr]

Everyone knows we Brits have our very own esoteric units of measurement.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/

Re:Doh!

[aamcf]

We could use the British Library, but I personally prefer to use the Cambridge University Library. Doing a degree at Cambridge was worth it just to be allowed in there :-)

Re:Doh!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Doh!

[Ragzouken]

Do we describe that in gb, gram bits?

Re:Doh!

[jonbryce]

Surely it should be measured in British Libraries or National Libraries of Scotland etc rather than Libraries of Congress?

Re:Doh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, signaling is by AC signals

I knew we were useful for something!

Re:Doh!

[jonbryce]

They forgot the unit of mass. Everyone knows they are measured in John Prescotts.

Re:Doh!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Surely it should be measured in British Libraries or National Libraries of Scotland etc rather than Libraries of Congress?

Nope. None of that weird metric shit.

Re:Doh!

[jonbryce]

We invented the imperial units you still use. It was the French who invented the weird metric stuff.

Re:Doh!

[Artifakt]

Yes, now get back to work pushing and pulling.

Re:Doh!

[daveime]

Ah, the "Fat Bastard Scale". Good to see the old ways are being maintained.

Noobs

[slummy]

An advisory board formed in just 2008 is still wet behind the ears. The UK is relying on a revolving door advisory panel. It's a shite state of affairs.

Re:Noobs

[Znork]

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.

Re:Noobs

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Yet curiously, you haven't cited anything either, and unlike the organisation in question, you also fail to distinguish between different kinds of IP.

For example, trademarks seem to be relatively uncontroversial: I've never seen anyone argue that allowing one organisation to pass itself off as another and trade on their positive reputation is a good thing.

Patents, on the other hand, are frequently criticised, particularly in jurisdictions where the concept has been stretched beyond physical inventions to things like mathematical algorithms and business processes.

What we're talking about here is copyright, and while there is no doubt that this is a controversial subject, I'm still waiting for any evidence that it is counterproductive, while hundreds of thousands of people make a living based on it and hundreds of millions of people enjoy works supported by copyright every day.

Re:Noobs

[Znork]

Yet curiously, you haven't cited anything either

The burden of proof is really on the pro-IP side, if your perspective is that the natural state is non-interference in markets. But the quick and easy ones would be; all of history proves that intellectual development happens without IP and most protection never generates any kind of financial return. We could go into the more complex counterproductive issues like transaction costs, merging development, etc, but that's a bit beyond this comment.

trademarks seem to be relatively uncontroversial

Trademarks are certainly much less damaging than patents and copyright, but there's certainly room for improvement.

I've never seen anyone argue that allowing one organisation to pass itself off as another and trade on their positive reputation is a good thing

That sortof depends on what you mean by passing itself off as another. The main complaint I'd make about trademarks is that these days they're often used for exactly that: dumping marketing money into a label and then slapping a trademark on someone elses product. I'd like to see them completed with, say, an originator reference, so if you're simply buying generics and slapping trademarks on them, the consumer would be free to buy the exact same product from someone else.

I'm still waiting for any evidence that it is counterproductive

Ok, I'll run a few easy ones for that too.

The economic incentive of copyright is derived from the ability to enforce monopoly pricing. The pricing curve for monopoly pricing always means that maximum revenue is generated when market demand is unfulfilled; therefore copyright inherently and provably leads to less people enjoying the work than without it.

Out of the money people spend on copyrighted works only a fraction reaches the actual creators. If you posit that the financial incentive is what drives creation, the fact that most of the money disappears to middlemen indicates that the specific construct of copyright that lets middlemen retain the revenue stream intended as an incentive is deeply counterproductive.

Then we have the loss of the ability of works to significantly build upon eachother (well, apart from Disney building on everyone else, of course) and the loss of freedom to translate. We have the examples of works being permanently lost due to rights issues (Doctor Who, as an example). Both provable counterproductive effects.

Etc. There are many provable flaws and much proof that creation of works happens with or without copyright, yet almost none that creation of works would stop or even slow down without it. Some very expensive ones (movies) might need to change, but then again, the main reason they're so expensive in the first place might very well be the existence of monopoly rights.

Re:Noobs

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But the quick and easy ones would be; all of history proves that intellectual development happens without IP and most protection never generates any kind of financial return.

I'm afraid you'll have to try harder than that. :-)

The question isn't whether development happened before copyright; of course it did. What matters is whether copyright is an effective incentive: do more and better works get shared so more people can enjoy them with or without copyright?

On that basis, it seems that copyright has been overwhelmingly successful. Compared to the patron-funded models of a few hundred years ago, under copyright millions of people are involved in creating works and they can reach audiences of hundreds of millions.

I don't know how you can possibly claim that "most protection never generates any kind of financial return", looking at the number of people making a living as part of the copyright-supported system.

The economic incentive of copyright is derived from the ability to enforce monopoly pricing. The pricing curve for monopoly pricing always means that maximum revenue is generated when market demand is unfulfilled; therefore copyright inherently and provably leads to less people enjoying the work than without it.

I appreciate the effort to use some real economics rather than hand-waving, but your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. You are ignoring a couple of fundamental properties of the way copyright works.

Firstly, without the monopoly a work might not have been cost-effective to produce at all. The big benefit of copyright compared to any other system I've seen proposed is that it allows the cost of a very expensive work to be spread across a large audience, with each individual consumer contributing only a small part of the cost.

This allows you, for example, to make very expensive movies without the patronage of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, because millions of viewers can each pay their $10 at the cinema. As another example, it also allows you to make OK-but-nothing-special novels that no one person would pay for entirely because the quality is not sufficient, but that a few people will enjoy reading while on the train enough to justify paying a small price for them, collectively supporting the author.

Another factor that your argument doesn't consider is that pricing doesn't have to stay the same over time. Indeed, it doesn't in practice, as you can tell by looking at, say, how much Amazon sells newly released film/TV series DVDs for compared to how much it sells them for a year later.

Out of the money people spend on copyrighted works only a fraction reaches the actual creators.

I'll be the first to agree that the current implementation of copyright is deeply flawed. One of those deep flaws is the way it allows powerful middlemen to benefit rather than either the artist or the consumer, which is clearly broken. I would support measures that prevented this, for example by allowing only a temporary (with the duration limited to a very short period by statute) assignment of exclusive rights from the artist to an agent.

Under such a system, an agent who did well for the artist could then renew their agreement, while one who failed or who ripped off the artist when their product became wildly successfuly would find the artist choosing to use someone else the following year. No-one but the original artist(s) would retain any semi-permanent rights until the work fell into the public domain, so you couldn't have the likes of Disney exploiting things decades after the artists' death or singing Happy Birthday in public being a copyright infringement.

Then we have the loss of the ability of works to significantly build upon eachother (well, apart from Disney building on everyone else, of course) and the loss of freedom to translate. We have the examples of works being permanently lost due to right

Lost?

[WillKemp]

I just read TFA in the paper (yeah, i'll hand my geek card in on the way out...) and it struck me that the most important thing that he doesn't mention is that there's no evidence that anyone downloading a pirate copy of anything would actually buy it if they couldn't download it for free. Therefore nothing is actually lost.

My guess is that 99% of the stuff "illegally" downloaded would never actually be bought if it wasn't there to download.

Re:Lost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just read TFA in the paper (yeah, i'll hand my geek card in on the way out...) and it struck me that the most important thing that he doesn't mention is that there's no evidence that anyone downloading a pirate copy of anything would actually buy it if they couldn't download it for free. Therefore nothing is actually lost.

I don't know. I have hundreds of CDs and enjoy having a CD collection, but these days I prefer to just download whatever I want to listen to and use the money I've saved on other things. Many of my peers on my filesharing network of choice report the same. Certainly we'd be buying a lot more CDs, thousands of dollars a year each, if only we couldn't just download for free.

Re:Lost?

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is that 99% of the stuff "illegally" downloaded would never actually be bought if it wasn't there to download.

Small pool among friends shows most of movie downloads are never played as well.
- 50% is never burned to DVD
- no time to watch DVDs
- when we have time, DVDs do not play anymore (4 years later)

Maybe time for a pool on Slashdot?

Re:Lost?

[FailedTheTuringTest]

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

Re:Lost?

[jd]

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.

Re:Lost?

[Anonymous Coward]

thousands of dollars a year each

(Emphasis mine) You're telling us you used to buy more than 100 CDs/year? And that your friends did that, too?

Really? REALLY? Bullshit.

You may have bought that many CDs/year when you started collecting and had to backfill your collection, but there aren't that many CDs worth getting each year, even if you're into multiple genres. If you're collecting for a decade, then you're claiming to own more CDs than there are good CDs in existence...

Re:Lost?

[hairyfeet]

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?

Re:Lost?

[msormune]

Yes, that's correct. Which means in "corporate speak" there would be a %1 increase in sales if there aren't downloads available. Which is why the companies want downloading to stop. Even the %1 is a pretty hefty sum of money.

Re:Lost?

[Grimbleton]

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.

Re:Lost?

[Grimbleton]

$230 after tax*

Re:Lost?

[Swanktastic]

That study successfully showed that people who download a lot also buy a lot (presumably because of their high interest in music). But, it doesn't really answer the question we all want to know- "In the absence of filesharing, would these people have bought more or less music than they did?"

Someone needs to do a randomized test where they take N music consumers and split them into two groups: one that gets a $20 allowance (no strings attached), and another that gets a $20 allowance contingent on an enforceable pledge not to download music. Perhaps they could even expand the pledge a bit to disguise the intention of the study... At the end of a period of time, count up the value of purchases made, and tell us whether there was a statistically different measurement.

Until I see something like this, I personally don't feel that comfortable saying that more downloading LEADS TO (not- is correlated with) more purchases.

p.s. I tried really hard not to type CORRELATION != CAUSATION until now...

                         

Re:Lost?

[ILongForDarkness]

I know I for one am like that. I'll download an album from a band because a friend said they were good, but I wouldn't buy it. I'll download a ton of T.V. shows, but I'd just watch them on cable when they were on, or heaven forbid use a VCR to record the shows so I can watch them when I want. How about the porn industry too? How many people download a 4GB movie only to find out they don't like it and download something else? They probably would be much much less likely to buy because they would have to either have the order on their credit card if they got it delivered to their house or face the stigma of going to the adult shop.

Also, another thought: if everyone was spending 25 pounds, or 125 depending on the version of the story a week on content there would be a lot of legal content floating around too. Wouldn't people quickly start borrowing stuff from someone that already has it rather than buy it themselves? When my friends have the complete set of Star Trek TNG I can borrow it from them not buy a copy myself. So the number of downloaders includes: people that would buy, people that would borrow, people that are trying because a friend recommended but wouldn't buy it to try it etc.

Re:Lost?

[aamcf]

There are reasons for owning copies of music that aren't "good". I have bought a couple of CDs for academic interest. I'm sure someone with a serious interest in say, 18th century French music could buy a lot of CDs that nobody would think were "good".

Re:Lost?

[SuperCharlie]

They also conveniently don't take into account the sales they receive when someone actually likes what they've downloaded enough to go buy the CD/DVD/Whatever. It's all a black pity hole of lost sales...

Re:Lost?

[WillKemp]

Exactly. The only sensible solution is to make it all really cheap and DRM-free. That way people can share it - which encourages people to buy stuff as soon as it's available so they can be first to share the latest cool stuff with their mates.

Re:Lost?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Someone needs to do a randomized test where they take N music consumers and split them into two groups: one that gets a $20 allowance (no strings attached), and another that gets a $20 allowance contingent on an enforceable pledge not to download music. Perhaps they could even expand the pledge a bit to disguise the intention of the study... At the end of a period of time, count up the value of purchases made, and tell us whether there was a statistically different measurement.

I'd be more intersted in this study if Apple hadn't sold >100 million songs on iTunes.

Then again, I work with something like 20 people who all make good money and all know how to go find stuff (music, movies, games, etc) and 'consume' it rather easily. Of those 20, only one I know does it because he's actively trying not to spend money.

I'm already convinced by my anecdotal experience and the utter and complete lack of proof of the alledged damages being done. It's hard to take the RIAA seriously when they claim 2 billion songs are traded a month then report record earnings two months later. Show me the damages, then let's get into the 'where does the money go?' studies.

Re:Lost?

[Bert64]

That's the issue, you download a 4gb movie and find that you don't like it, so you delete it.
They would rather you bought it, thus wasting your money before you realized it's crap. They also don't like the fact that modern communications such as the internet and sms messages allow people to spread the word about a lousy movie.

Re:Lost?

[jonbryce]

But what do you spend your thousands of dollars a year on now that you aren't spending them on CDs?

I spend my hundreds of pounds on concert tickets and cinema tickets.

Re:Lost?

[shoemilk]

Is that 1% more than they spend on lawyer fees and god awful commercials and all the other crap they do to try to stop the unstoppable?

Re:Lost?

[abigsmurf]

Or maybe, people who download are naturally people with an interest in music/movies/games and would spend more on these things anyway? Perhaps if they did a comparison between movie lovers who download movies and those who don't it would be a fair study.

Someone who downloads a lot of movies/games/music is someone with an active interest. You are comparing a randomised sample (general population of buyers) to the spending habbits of a relatively non random, selective population. If the study was carried out in that way, the results are relatively meaningless (or at least the conclusion is)

Re:Lost?

[msormune]

They are not even trying to completely stop piracy. They are trying to convince the great public downloading copyrighted material is wrong. That is the motive behind the scare tactics and stupid ads.

The ads are NOT targeted for people who know better piracy isn't stealing: They are for the great audience who can't tell the difference. So they are repeating the message: "Piracy is stealing. Stealing is wrong.".The most important thing for them is trying to stop piracy from really going mainstream.

Re:Lost?

[jamstar7]

My guess is that 99% of the stuff "illegally" downloaded would never actually be bought if it wasn't there to download.

I was gonna say you can't buy Coronation Street, but they list it on Amazon.com for 50 cents an episode. I doubt they have all the episodes from '61 when it started, since The Beeb used to recycle tapes (which is why you just can't find early Dr Who episodes that easily), but you can still watch it if you're that strung out on it...

Re:Lost?

[jamstar7]

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.

But hairy, Buffy was hunting vampires. By definition, vampires suck.

Re:Lost?

[FrankieBaby1986]

It all comes down to situation. This varies greatly. I am a poor, half-starved college student, and If I couldn't download the occasional album, I would simply do without. Just as I do not have a television or cable service, and many of my peers think that's weird. However, In my tiny, bedroom-only apartment, I simply could not fit a spare CRT Television from home (campus is across state from home) and I simply cannot justify purchasing a new flat-panel when we already have a spare 19' CRT TV or two at home.

Why would I pay ~12-20 bucks for an album when I can see a live band at a bar for 2 bucks every other weekend? I'd say that's been far more entertaining than a CD would have been.

The real question is what are the hard stats? How many people would actually pay for music if they actually could, and couldn't obtain them otherwise? Additionally, with the advent of cheap, ubiquitous digital replication, the perceived value of a recording has gone down, and copyright now only serves to attempt to artificially inflate the "value" of a recording. As my father always told me, something is only worth what people are willing to pay for it.

But, as I said, it varies greatly by situation.

Re:Lost?

[wildstoo]

A couple of months ago, I downloaded the first season of The West Wing, after it was recommended to me. I never watched it when it was aired (I don't watch much TV).

I watched the entire season over a couple of days, and liked it enough to buy the DVD box set with all 7 seasons. I don't regret my purchase.

If I hadn't downloaded the first season, there's no way I'd have bought the box set. P2P made that sale.

Re:Lost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I found about a dozen series on P2P, and was thinking about actually buying some of those on DVD.

But then I remembered that I have video on demand through my cable provider, so I just watched them all on my cable box and didn't spend any money. ... and it's the P2P that is supposedly "killing" the DVD sales?

Re:Lost?

[dogeatery]

I've never downloaded a film or TV show in my life (takes too long, and I'd have to watch it by myself on a tiny screen) but I do check them out from the library. If I couldn't get them at the library, there are many shows and films I'd never have watched at all.

On a somewhat related note, I'm kind of curious as to why the *AA doesn't see lending out a DVD or CD isn't the same as obtaining a copy from someone online. Whether it's a library or a friend dropping it off at someone's house, it's basically the same process, right?

I think someone does not understand economics.

[Edward Nardella]

People don't spend less money because they get something that they would have payed for for free, they just spend it on something else.

Re:I think someone does not understand economics.

[jd]

Take Microsoft, for example.

Re:I think someone does not understand economics.

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, are you sure? And I thought I had the perfect plan to topple the music industry: buy 1M cheap 1TB hard drives and fill all of them with illegal copies of songs, and then send those to random people. That's about 200 billion songs (at 5MB per piece) and at 99c per song would cause the recording industry losses of about 198 billions!

Mwahahahaa! Tremble at my wrath RIAA, your days are numbered!

Re:I think someone does not understand economics.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, really, please take them.

Compare with $100 bill, just paper

[Anonymous Coward]

$100 bill is just paper. It costs maybe a few cents to make. I suppose you would steal those too (counterfit) if you thought you wouldn't get caught. Damn, just don't fucking steal. Is that too hard for you to understand? I'd kick your ass if I was in front of you, asswipe! and then shove all the DVDs I could find down your throat, after first cutting them in half, because knowing you, you'd try and shit them so you could copy them.

Re:Compare with $100 bill, just paper

[Ragzouken]

A $100 bill actually worth $100 dollars, though. That is to say, that I can trade a $100 bill to someone for $100 worth of goods. I can't do that with an mp3 file, it has essentially no resale value in my hands.

Re:Compare with $100 bill, just paper

[Missing_dc]

I wonder what childhood issue caused this rant?

You get caught stealing, publicly embarassed and then privately beaten?

repress much?

Re:Compare with $100 bill, just paper

[tiananmen tank man]

Very interesting comment Ragzouken. If a digital good has no resale value or can not be resold, what is it really worth?

Nearly 10% of GDP!

[msgmonkey]

And there I was thinking it was the credit crunch that has caused our economic problems, it's obvious now that the real problem are the millions of teenage girls downloading britney spears albums (or who ever is in at the moment).

Re:Nearly 10% of GDP!

[that IT girl]

You got it. Why take responsibility for their own large-scale, globally-influencing, selfish behaviour when they can make other people take responsibility for their much-smaller-scale infractions?

More on Goldacre's blog

[oldelpaso]

The version of TFA on Goldacre's blog is slightly longer (the Guardian version must have been subedited for dead tree format), and contains links to the sources of the material he's talking about.

I, too, am impressed by these figures.

[jd]

So they added up all the bittorent users, multiplied the figure by 25, and assumed that was the total cost to the economy.

I'm sure the Blender team would LOVE to receive 25 pounds ($40) for every download of each and every one of their movies. Ms. Boyle would doubtless be substantially richer if she were given the same for every person who had ever downloaded (or watched on YouTube) a clip of her singing. More members of Ubuntu might be able to play space tourist if each and every file (whether it be a CD, DVD or just a patch) resulted in a $40 donation. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails would be over the moon if each individual song they've released for free got them that in checks received via fan mail.

I'm not saying that all the legit material added together make a substantial chunk of the corrected figure, but rather that the researchers never bothered to consider the fact that the material is not of equal value and that some items have a value of zero. They assumed everything was illegal and everything had identical worth.

That goes beyond Bad Science. How many of you, in elementary/primary school, got taught algebra by being given shopping lists? Pretty much everyone? Good. It would be a pointless exercise if apples and oranges had the same price ($40 each), so we can assume your class used different prices for different object, right? Right. So. Hands up who can tell me what you could do then that these researchers didn't do now?

Re:I, too, am impressed by these figures.

[n4djs]

This is similar to the fantasty that the value of a publicly traded company is number of shares issued x last cost per share. That assumption fails to take into account that it is unlikely that
a) you would get the same price (as a minimum) for all shares,
b) that there is sufficient liquid cash in the monetary system to fund the purchases for all companies,
c) that there would be sufficient willing buyers for said stocks.
These loss estimates are just a case of someone putting a monsterously big number up to get a prosecutor to pay attention. If the RIAA were to go into court and be candid about the true value of some of this media, they would get zero attention. I have always thought that is a waste of government money to pursuit the majority of copyright claims, as the cost of the prosecution of the offenders is greater than the benefit derived by the government via taxation and civil fines, and in many cases, to the original author.
At some point, there needs to be a better balance between the nature of any published work (that, at some level, anything you say or do is spread to the winds and uncontrollable once you release it from your control) vs. the government enforcing artificial monopolies at times where it doesn't make sense financially. I say it is time to shorten the periods of copyright protection before the legal system strangles on litigation....
There is also the question of copyright protections for publicly published works that are no longer available commerically (not through the desire of the author, but due to the inherent economic friction of carrying costs for titles that produced in quantities exceeding apparent marginal demand. How much obligation does the government have to protect publishers that guess wrong in the short term? in the long term? individual authors? Who should bear these enforcement costs, and when should these costs fall back to the copyright holder?

Re:I, too, am impressed by these figures.

[arkhan_jg]

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.

Re:I, too, am impressed by these figures.

[TubeSteak]

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.

5 years ago.

Five years ago the largest hard drive was ~400GB and cost at least ~$400.
Five years ago TiVo could only record one channel at a time.
Five years ago the iPhone didn't exist.
etc etc etc

Let me say that again: They're using numbers from 5 years ago.
They might as well use figures from 10 years ago. They're equally useful.

Re:I, too, am impressed by these figures.

[jd]

The burning question that remains: Was the fairy dust from freshly-picked Cornish pixies?

"120 billion pounds of material"

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly how many electrons is that?

Re:"120 billion pounds of material"

[Bill Currie]

About 6e40 Electrons. Far too many to be talking about "exact", an I certainly don't want to be the one trying to weigh them.

>>> Me=9.10938215e-31
>>> 120e9*0.45/Me
5.9279541807344204e+40

Hmm, since the mass of the Earth is 5.98e27g, Oxygen (most abundant element in the Earth's crust) is 16g/mol and a mole is 6.02e23, that's about 3e-8 of all the electrons in the Earth.

Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[David Gerard]

More than seven million Britons use illegal downloading sites that keep billions of pounds circulating inside the British economy rather than being sent overseas to US media companies or obscure tax havens, despite almost everything on offer being appalling rubbish no sane person would pay a penny for, according to unnamed researchers copying a passing number found in a 2004 press release from music industry lawyers trying to drum up business.

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.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[Keeper Of Keys]

Nicely done, except that music doesn't - and movies most certainly don't - have "an inherent cost of production of zero". Sharing cannot be wrong, and kicking the old media gatekeepers out of the arena cannot happen hard enough or fast enough, but there needs to be some way to share the cost as well as the benefit of the things we love to download for free.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! Rationalize much?

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[David Gerard]

Cost of reproduction, or marginal cost. Economics terms are not quite English.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

the rips off itunes are the dogey ones, what no flac apple?

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[Keeper Of Keys]

But getting people to pay for CDs was a way of recouping studio costs, and the cost of sustaining the artist while they were creating the music - plus a little towards the relatively low (economic) cost of mass-producing CDs. Now that there is no reason for people to buy CDs, some other means has to be found to keep artists alive while they create, or just accept that the era of the professional musician is over.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[vivaelamor]

Now that there is no reason for people to buy CDs, some other means has to be found to keep artists alive while they create, or just accept that the era of the professional musician is over.

I would argue that on the contrary, the era of the professional musician will rebirth and replace the era we have suffered of the professional publishers and marketeers.

I would hope that for example, Amy Winehouse, would be too busy actually being a musician to become successful and destroy her health at the same time. Professionalism is about the effort put into your work in pursuit of making a living.. not the amount of money you are making. If the rewards are too low to meet a minimum standard of living then the demand for professional work is not high enough to warrant the number of people trying to make a living through it. I currently work for a charity, if I have your view of professionalism right then charity work would be considered amatuer. I believe the reality is quite the opposite, you will struggle to find more professionals anywhere than in the charity sector as the work motivates people more than the rewards.

By the way, I am a fan of Amy Winehouse but would be much more likely to buy her music if her success wasn't being propped up by the professionalism of her marketing team when she seems talented enough to succeed on her merits as a musician alone. To me, professional musicians are people like Eva Cassidy (who sang other peoples songs and saw little reward in her lifetime), Issa (Jane Siberry, after mixed commercial success and failure sold nearly all her posessions and now gives her music away over the web), Derek Sherinian (really really takes music seriously) and countless other unknown musicians who haven't hit the big time because they aren't doing it for the money. The sooner the record industry is dead the sooner professional musicians will be on an equal footing with those whose primary motivation is money.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[Znork]

But getting people to pay for CDs was a way of recouping studio costs

It's always easy to accumulate costs; that's basically the main disadvantage of monopolies versus free market competition.

With today's technology advances the actual costs needed to produce an album are approaching zero as well; the rest of the supported costs, release parties, free samples, payola, other marketing, free blow to the execs, etc, are not necessary for producing the product and would not occur in a competitive market.

some other means has to be found to keep artists alive while they create, or just accept that the era of the professional musician is over.

If it's necessary, yes. For many, producing music is a privilege, not a day job, so I have no doubt that music would continue to get produced even without any extra incentive.

But if we really need one, the method I'd favour would be to just slap a levy on the material on a per-reproduction basis, with the levy going directly to the creators. Somewhat like what we have for radio plays, but as a percentage, and for every kind of reproduction where money changes hands. Such a solution would basically cut through the entire problem.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[Bert64]

But now it's a way of ripping off the public, ensuring that the artist and even moreso the production company executives can live a life of luxury far above the true value of the work they do.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[cliffski]

What bullshit.
The UK has a huge IP industry, movies, books, TV, software, games...
HAs it occured to you that we lose out as a nation by people outside the UK pirating that content rather than buying it?
Sorry to interrupt your "content producers are evil" bullshit.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[mpe]

Now that there is no reason for people to buy CDs, some other means has to be found to keep artists alive while they create,

There's a difference between keeping them alive and keeping them (plus a crowd of hangers on) rich.

or just accept that the era of the professional musician is over.

Plenty of musicians are not "professional musicians" in the first place. It's also perfectly possible for musicians to provide live entertainment as a sole means of income.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[Keeper Of Keys]

I acknowledge the meaning of "professional" as you are using it, but I simply meant someone who earns their living as a musician. I am well aware that many musicians who take their work seriously, probably most of the ones whose music I love, earn very little from it - and we all know that a lot who are paid well produce little of lasting worth. This is why generally musicians don't seem overly bothered about the digital revolution, as it presents little threat to their non-existent livelihood. In fact many are probably seeing their income go up now that they can reach their audiences more directly.

One thing the people you mention have grasped is that in order to keep earning, they must keep producing. I am a fan of Issa too, and Kristin Hersh is another who seems to be making a healthy living from her website. The dream of making a chart-topping album and living off it for the rest of your life was always an unhealthy one, and inextricably bound up with that superstar lifestyle.

In short, I think we probably agree even if our terminology is different.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[vivaelamor]

Sometimes I wonder if all the worlds ills are due to semantics.

Seriously though, the more and more I read the opinions of actual artists and developers the more I think the deserving ones would really be better off if things were to change and I am always gladdened when people voice similar views. With any luck the change will merely be a matter of generations.. which is why the record industry is trying to get inside schools to start warping the minds of the next generation as well as changing laws while the law makers are still ignorant, to protect their interests going into retirement.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

"With today's technology advances the actual costs needed to produce an album are approaching zero as well; "

Absolute rubbish. The cost of one component, the multitrack recorder, has got a little cheaper.

The actual cost of making a quality album, however, has actually risen.

The main reason for this is that most bands cannot book a studio for a week, lay down the tracks and mix it in the same week. The reasons for this are firstly that most modern musicians are not really good enough, and secondly that modern production fashions are much more critical about sounds and timing, so a lot of editing is involved.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[theanorak]

Do you write for the Daily Mash (www.dailymash.co.uk)?

You should.

Re:Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK

[David Gerard]

No, I write for another one!

Though I'm an avid Daily Mash reader and like it a lot. And curse when Daily Mash or NewsBiscuit get a good idea before I do.

Hypocrite alert!

[Afforess]

Although I agree with his point, Ben Goldacre also makes up some facts, like this one "...for example, people who download more also buy more music." I would have to disagree, after all if I can get the music for free, why would anyone ever pay?

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[anonieuweling]

- To get a decent bearer for the media
- Decent artwork, info
- To get more after getting interested
- To support the artist as well-made choice after checking out the art
Yes, I am not of the ipod-generation.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Afforess]

Really, I though the Pirate Bay already offered those. Except the artist support, obviously.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[freedom_india]

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?

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[timmarhy]

do you even know what a hypocrite is???

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Afforess]

That's not the same thing at all. Your analogy is flawed. You can download an infinite amount of music online, whereas you amount of "fecal matter" is limited by the amount of organisms you own.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Bazzargh]

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.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Afforess]

Yes. A hypocrite is someone who says lies are bad, then makes something up (lies).

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Afforess]

The article is full of vague numbers and statistics. It's just manipulation of numbers to prove a point

"The study found that regular downloaders of unlicensed music spent an average of £5.52 a month on legal digital music. This compares to just £1.27 spent by other music fans. What other music fans? The one's with dial-up connections? Who then? You can't compare apples to oranges.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Keeper Of Keys]

Why indeed, except that some of us do:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music (linked form the original version on Ben Goldacre's blog)

I actually feel guilty for buying physical product, though, when most of the cost won't even go to the artist, and all it will do is sit on a shelf. (Here's an ancient blog post of mine about this.) I'd rather make a direct donation to the artist, but many artist sites still don't have provision for this.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Splab]

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.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Bazzargh]

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.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[aamcf]

I've seen a few songs on YouTube, and I've gone on to buy them (often the whole album). If I like something enough to listen to it, I think it is only fair that I pay for it.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[vectorious]

If you look at his website version of the article, he actually provides a link which reports a study showing this very fact - so I can hardly accuse him of hypocracy, for this at least.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[freedom_india]

organisms you own.

If you think you "own" your wife in any way it shows:
a) You are living in 1940s and 1950s
b) You are a male chavunist.
I wanna buy the latest Akon hits from iTunes. Sadly Apple doesn't allow me because of "geographical" restrictions. So, i buy it from legalsounds.com
That doesn't mean i don't pay. And FYI i used to download backstreet boys and britney from Napster. I bought every one of their CDs when it became available.
Same is the case now.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[oneirophrenos]

Really, I though the Pirate Bay already offered those. Except the artist support, obviously.

I would so much rather support the artist by direct remuneration, i.e. donating to them through PayPal or something, than spend money on CD's that I don't use, that cost resources to produce, that just end up piling in the corners, and that are useless in a few decades. I can get the audio through a torrent service anyway, all without the shipping of cargo loads of plastic discs from overseas. Regrettably few artists provide for this, so I try to support my favourite bands by buying their t-shirts and other stuff that is actually useful to me, as well as going to gigs.

"Use iTunes!", I hear someone shouting. Well, I won't. And this article serves as one more reason why no-one should, and why we shouldn't do anything that profits the dying recording industry.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[pandrijeczko]

Music is my number one hobby and I download a hell of a lot of it on BitTorrent - but only because I consider £10 to be a perfectly reasonable price for a great album but a total rip-off for a bad one. In reality, because I listen mostly to classic rock and blues music and buy new or secondhand on line, I probably pay an average of £5-£6 for a CD.

However, with that said, I own somewhere in the region of 1500 music CDs and with that size of collection, if something I download is crap then I delete it once I've listened to it because there's no point hoarding something I won't ever listen to again.

The point of my argument is that because I listen before I buy and then buy what I've liked, then I never buy a CD I consider to be bad value for money. (For example, if I've paid £4 for a CD with only 4 good tracks on it, then I still think that's good value.) Therefore, I keep buying them and, in actual fact, I won't ever pay for a digital download because as an album (rather than track by track) fan, I believe "pick n mix" music will ultimately kill the type of music I like anyway. (Incidentally, this is the reason why a world class band like AC/DC doesn't release compilation albums and doesn't make their albums available for digital download.)

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[tepples]

You can download an infinite amount of music online

Citation needed. Internet access isn't infinitely fast, and a lot of providers have transfer caps per month in addition to per second. In some places, you can't even fill an 8 GB iPod in a month without running into prohibitive overage fees.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Ragzouken]

If you assume he's talking about a wife and have this knee-jerk reaction it shows:
a) You are living in the 1960s and 1970s
b) You are a female chauvinist.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[freedom_india]

You are a female chauvinist

How the hell can one be a female chavunist?

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Ragzouken]

You can be a female chauvinist by having an 'extreme and unreasoning partisanship' on behalf of females, analogous to the 'extreme and unreasoning partisanship' on behalf of males that male chauvinists have.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[that IT girl]

Who... mentioned a wife?

Anyway, you lost any credibility you might have otherwise had when you said you listen to BSB and Britney. On purpose!

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a sad fact that, on Slashdot, a car analogy usually is shittier than a shit analogy.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[Artifakt]

The original person, Chauvin, from which we derive the word 'chauvinist', had an extreme and unreasoning partisanship for France, including French persons of either gender, French ways of doing things, and essentially everything related to France, and so female chauvinist is a separate derived construction based on substituting gender for nation, and not an inversion of male chauvinist at all. If one is a good phrase, both are.

Re:Hypocrite alert!

[freedom_india]

Oh... Thanks for the information.
Didn't know the word chavinust comes from a person.
Thanks buddy.

Can we stop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we stop using the whole "lies, damn lies, and blah" quote every time there's an article about lying?

It was cute the first time or two, and yes, I know the origin, but it's not even a remotely funny or relatable quote.

Re:Can we stop?

[KasperMeerts]

You must be new here.

slashdot will take care of it ;)

[karl3]

the page has comments after all.

Re:slashdot will take care of it ;)

[karl3]

oops, i knew i should have red the article before posting! thought this was pro-ria propaganda.

a couple orders of magnitude is nothing . . .

[Alan R Light]

So, the first number was off by a factor of ten, not counting the silly estimate of 25 Pounds when even 2.5 Pounds was doubtless too much - meaning that the original number was off by at least a factor of one hundred.

Still nothing compared to what government and government-related groups can come up with to scare people. Anyone remember how we were all told in the '80s that 1.5 million children were kidnapped each year in the United States, when the real relevant figure (kidnappings by strangers) was closer to 150? That was off by a factor of 10,000.

And how about those Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? We're going to find them any day now.

Yes, what this proves to us once again is that as bad and unethical as industry can be, they still can't compete with government and the do-gooders.

Re:a couple orders of magnitude is nothing . . .

[siddesu]

True observation, but the *AA companies are a part of the propaganda arm of the big scary government, just as the big weapons manufacturers are a part of the war machine of the same government. They are not "better" or "worse", they are the same thing ;)

Re:a couple orders of magnitude is nothing . . .

[pbhj]

So, the first number was off by a factor of ten, not counting the silly estimate of 25 Pounds when even 2.5 Pounds was doubtless too much

In the UK top music tracks from Tesco, et al., are 80p-£1 IIRC?

PPV movies (Sky, Virgin, etc.) are £2-£4 according to Which? consumer magazine.

So there's probably at least another factor of 10 right there.

Re:a couple orders of magnitude is nothing . . .

[T Murphy]

Maybe you just want an example to list, but its diffucult to tell which people actually believe the WMD scare was a government-brewed hoax. Multiple countries believed Saddam had them, Saddam was known to have them in the past, and he acted every bit like he still had them. Based on the evidence the government hoax idea has the support of any other conspiracy theory.

Competition

[namgge]

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

Re:Competition

[vivaelamor]

I think he probably considers such factors already but tries to limit the scope of his articles to strengthen the impact they have. 10 well written articles about different points on the same subject is far easier to deal with than one monsterous report which might never make it into mainstream media. Consider that TFA was actually an edited version of the one on his blog.. if he'd done a more indepth analysis they may not have even have published it.

The statistic they never give

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Lost? Already been sold, again and again.

[Bob_Who]

Actually, much of what I download I bough many years ago on vinyl, then again on tape (sometimes twice on tape for a favorite) and even again on CDROM. I mean how many times am I supposed to pay for Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon, Ziggy, etc.? The fact is I still have the CD's but its easier to download the good rips that others do correctly, instead of my poorly tagged and labeled rendition. I know my favorite artists get my $$ so we need to eliminate the middle men. RIAA and the payola music network can go pimp someone else. Its time to take these clowns down, and its up to the artist to do it. Artist well know that they never see a dime of all of that money they've extorted from soccer moms, and if anything it costs them sales overall. Eat the rich.

Its a moot point, its here for good.

[Bob_Who]

"In the absence of file sharing, would these people have bought more or less music than they did?"

The can be no absence of file sharing, we don't live in a vacuum and you can't un-ring a bell. And it doesn't matter anyway. What does matter is a bunch of greedy corporate pigs will get your money any way that they can and will pursue every legal avenue at their disposal to do it. But don't delude yourself into weighing ethics when it comes to this type of warfare and highway robbery. They reap the BENEFITS of file sharing and bandwidth bloat, and they'll double and triple dip, rip off the artist, and sue a soccer mom too. Screw em. Nobody needs or wants what they offer...shareholders are lousy citizens. Artists don't need old terms in a new distribution network that requires far less investment for product distribution and marketing than 20 years ago....MTV, Tower Records, Bass Tickets cost $$ but Youtube, Myspace, etc. is FREE. The artist will be just FINE.

Lost income from a film download?

[legirons]

According to the article, the "lost income" from a downloaded movie is about £.40 (the rental price of the movie), which seems a bit high - a postal video-rental account at tesco or lovefilm costs about £1.50 per DVD rented (plus they're spending £0.50 of bandwidth to download it, which is money going into the British economy and supporting the government's broadband strategy).

However, these figures (assisted by the assumption that every file downloaded from a "file-sharing site" is a commercial movie that they'd otherwise have rented) imply that downloaders are watching 3,600 movies per year. Ehh? Given the length of each film (and these people have to be at school or work or sleeping most of the time) I wonder if those figures are even physically possible.

Re:Lost income from a film download?

[legirons]

"According to the article, the "lost income" from a downloaded movie is about £.40" - should have said £2.40

Broken Window Fallacy

[mdwh2]

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.

Re:Broken Window Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

this is basically the parable of the broken window.

I prefer the song of the gasman.

Re:Broken Window Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

I think not.

In the "parable of the broken window" the window is a useful thing with a purpose.

In the "parable of the downloaded CD" the CD is a useless bit of plastic media, holding a series of bits which can be more efficiently obtained elsewhere.

Re:Broken Window Fallacy

[mdwh2]

I never said "parable of the downloaded CD".

The "window" here is not the CD, it's bittorrent (or generally being able to copy it). The analogy to breaking the windows is preventing copying. The flaw in the claim that "breaking windows" helps the economy (or that not "breaking windows" is harmful to the economy) is that the money that would have been spent on "repairing windows" (or buying CDs) is not actually lost, and instead spent elsewhere.

(Note, I am not saying that they are equal on an ethical point of view - I realise it is unfair to equate wanting copyright law with vandalising windows - my point is not about the ethics, but about the economical claim that downloading causes a loss for the economy as a whole, and not merely the record industry.)

mod parent down

[cheftw]

lern 2 inglish - I could barely understand that.

If I can block Idle I should surely be able to block badly written posts.

But then we don't even have unicode here..

Re:mod parent down

[shoemilk]

What are you on about? The only poorly written post here is yours...

Re:mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

NO U!

Re:mod parent down

[Hal_Porter]

its lrn 2 engrish or l2e

noob

Absolutely Nothing Is Lost

[mdwh2]

Indeed - the TV I've downloaded is material I've already paid for, in that it's produced by the BBC which I pay for via compulsory licence/tax, or it's shown on the channels that I pay for on cable, and I simply decided to download rather than watch on the TV. As an even more explicit example, I discovered yesterday that one of my Rome DVDs that I bought was damaged. I suppose I could take it back, try to argue because I don't have the receipt anymore, then even if they accept it, I have to give the whole package back, wait ages for the replacement, and then hope the new one works. Or I'll just download it, and have it to watch straight away.

But furthermore, even if every download was a lost sale, whilst it would be a "loss" to them, it still wouldn't be a loss to the economy. No money is lost, the money still exists, and can be spent on other things.

It hurts to see your trade being abused.

[Opportunist]

Slightly offtopic, I admit it, but please read it regardless.

"Lies, damn lies and statistics". "Don't trust statistics you didn't forge yourself". "70% of statistics are made up, 80% of all people know that".

And so on.

There's a reason for those jokes, and it's shoddy statistics. Often, it's not even malice, it's simple inaptness. Ok, far too often it's also malice. Numbers are just too impressive, and they have authority. People believe them. They are regarded as "hard facts". They are not "a lot", they're not "a few", they are a million, a billion, and so on.

Funny about it is, though, that people believe those statistics. Not much differently than they believe the fuzzy "a few" and "a lot" statements. Because they're unable to test them. Even if it is as easy to throw the "numbers" out the window as in this example. 25 pounds "damage" per infringment. Nuts? 25 pounds ain't even what a current blockbuster costs when you buy it on DVD (legally, ok? Not talking about those flying Chinese traders where you know you're buying a bootleg copy). But did anyone care to check?

Probably no. It was numbers. It was hard facts. Hey, they wouldn't dare to release information like this if they didn't fact check, do they?

Heh. It was printed in the SUN. Dunno about you, but I've made up my mind about the fact checking abilities of their reporters...

Anyway. It does hurt to see my original trade being abused that way. I'm a statistician, at least according to my degree. I was, and still am, fascinated with the ability to aggregate a whole lot of samples into a simple, understandable statement. Statistics can serve a valuable purpose if, and only if, they are used sensibly and earnestly. And NOT "creatively".

So here's a little guide how to use statistics and how to gauge their credibility:

If you don't get to see the sample or don't get any information about how the sample was gathered, throw it to the dump. I can easily "prove" that every single listener to music buys it and that no copying is going on if I pick my sample "right". It's easy to "prove" every computer gamer is a potential addict if I only look at people playing 10+ hours a day. If you don't get told what's the source of the data and what data they worked with, chances are good that the whole deal is rigged.

If it's a "voluntary", "opt-in" sample, throw it out. All those statistics based on online questionaires where people can sign up and go to to fill out forms if they're "interested enough" are worthless. You'll get samples filled out by people who have a strong opinion about the subject already. When there is an online questionaire regarding "too much internet use", what kind of answers do you expect to get? Worse, what kind of people do you think will participate at all? It's a rigged sample from the start.

If you don't get to see the sample size, throw it out. The sample size gives you a fairly good idea how much of an error you may expect. 1/N^2 is a good rule of thumb (with N being the sample size) for the statistical error. That doesn't mean that a small sample automatically leads to a huge error margin, 200 samples may be already good enough if they are picked well, and if they're not "hand picked" (see above).

If you don't get to see a mean, a median and a standard deviation, throw it out. It's easy to prove that everyone's doing quite fine on average, even in this economy, because on average everyone has enough money to live well. The mean says so (the "average"). Without standard deviation, you won't get to see that the average is nothing but an artificial number that has no reflection in reality. It's not that everyone has the average, there's some who have a TON more and many that have a LOT less. The median would easily tell you so (that's the "middle number" of the sample). Comparing mean ("average") and median ("middle") tells you a lot about whether your sample was homogenous or whether you have a few VERY different bits in the sample (which should have been cut from the stati

Re:It hurts to see your trade being abused.

[Strilanc]

The error is more like 1/sqrt(N), not 1/N^2.

It would be nice if twice as many people was four times as accurate instead of the other way around, though.

Re:It hurts to see your trade being abused.

[Opportunist]

Sorry, somewhere that minus got lost in the translation. :)

I won't post before I have my first coffee again, promised.

Re:It hurts to see your trade being abused.

[mrogers]

It was printed in the SUN. Dunno about you, but I've made up my mind about the fact checking abilities of their reporters...

That's a dreadful and potentially libelous thing to say. Every article in The Sun is rigorously checked for facts by a highly skilled editorial team, and if any are found they're removed before publication.

Anti-factual opinion alert!

[jonaskoelker]

Although I agree with his point, Ben Goldacre also makes up some facts, like this one "...for example, people who download more also buy more music." I would have to disagree, after all if I can get the music for free, why would anyone ever pay?

Let's see what you're saying.

You're saying that a particular factual claim, "downloaders buy more", is made up.

Your argument is "I disagree", and a theoretical explanation of why.

Your position would have been much more well-argued (and thus credible) if you had provided factual observations, i.e. evidence, to back up your theoretical assertion.

A sibling poster has linked to evidence for Goldacre's position. Read it and make up your own mind.

80% of Countries have a GDP Lower than this

[Anonymous Coward]

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal), there were only about 40 countries with GDP higher than 120 billion pounds.

This number is ridiculous. It's like something Dr. Evil would demand because he's been frozen and doesn't know what money is worth anymore.

I would say that the UK music industry was delusional even if they tried to argue that their entire industry was worth 120 billion pounds (7% of UK GDP).

I think you're the one that doesn't understand

[abigsmurf]

An individual may spend their money on something else. What exactly is the person who has lost their job and has no money going to be spending?

Even if they are able to quickly get a job in a different industry (a big ask for people with specialised jobs) they'll have still been unemployed for a while and not spending much during that time.

Re:I think you're the one that doesn't understand

[hitmark]

so what your saying is "bolt down the borders, we are leaking money(work)"?

also, are you trying to say that for each link where money changes hands, said money is multiplied? or am i just reading it wrong?

Lies, Damned Lies, and the UK Copyright Industry?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was expecting to see Apple advertising.

The copyright industry is not the problem

[DaveGod]

Unlike the topic title, TFA does not call out the UK Copyright Industry, it calls out shoddy research and shoddy journalism.

Repeatedly here on slashdot we call out on whatever copyright industry. Apparently it's insightful and/or informative to point out what everyone pretty much assumed before they finished reading the title - the figures are obviously total nonsense. Like it's any kind of surprise that the lobby of such an industry have their own motives. The real problem is the journalists and politicians recite this drivel as if they believe it to be fact, and the only plausable explanations for doing so are:
- not doing any diligence at all and taking whatever "facts" anyone gives them at face value.
- having not only no basic knowledge of economics, statistics or piracy, but frankly no common sense whatsoever.
- dishonesty and/or nor caring in their truth.

In journalism, I think many do not care aslong as it makes a few sales or pleases advertisers. Some seem content to mildy question the figures, but nonetheless imply agreement to their principle argument. The Guardian is one of few that seem surprised and reluctant when they are asked to eat this shit.

For politicians, given the current farce over their expenses claims in the UK, but in particular their inability to grasp what they have done wrong or how they have failed us, I assume all of the above. Sadly, the Labour party are in the process of imploding, which may weaken the public's ability to express their fury and disgust at the next general election.

Re:The copyright industry is not the problem

[hitmark]

Get fat contributions from lobbyists...

Also, they may hope to convert a failing hard industry into a booming soft industry...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

got to love the word games...

[hitmark]

"consumed"? "intellectual property"?

i have heard about astroturfing, but this must be astrorealitying...

how can one consume something thats not tangible in the first place? or for that matter, how can it be property?

Re:got to love the word games...

[Anonymous Coward]

We have strong competition laws which discourage monopoly. Why then would you give a near permanent monopoly to an artist for a product that costs virtually nothing to reproduce? The law needs to be overhauled. It is clearly counterproductive and shows a disdain for competition and the fundamental principles of the market economy.

-I may be anon, but I'm no coward. I'm just too lazy to sign in.

Why is this news?

[benjfowler]

We all know that Big Media are greedy, disrespectful, lying scum, who'll say and do anything to attempt to capture regulators and game the legal system.

We saw this decades ago with BSA, and their deceitful, riscible and stupid fake claims of multi-billion dollar "losses" from piracy. These people are the same bastards who market cigarettes to kids in Third World countries, and deny global warming.

It's always the same people, peddling the same lies, the same moral bankruptcy, and the same insane, mindless greed.

With all due respect to Dr Goldacre, why is this news?

Not Industry -- Her Majesty's Government

[JakartaDean]

Big surprise. Everything that has come from this industry has been at best broad guesstimates, at worst intentionally spread lies.

If you RTFA, you'll see that the inflated figure came, exaggerated by a factor of 10 due to a typo, from a government agency. It says "The report was commissioned by a government body called Sabip, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. On the billions lost it says: 'Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10bn (IP rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs.'"

And, later, "Sabip refused to answer questions in emails, insisted on a phone call, told me that they had taken steps but wouldn't say what and 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."

I think that's the true tragedy, that the media companies have been able to get even government think tanks lying for them.

Re:Not Industry -- Her Majesty's Government

[bob.appleyard]

The gov't agency itself quoted the figure from a press release. This agency will be stuffed with industry lobbyists anyway. That's how you govern responsibly, after all.

Re:Not Industry -- Her Majesty's Government

[Anonymous Coward]

If you RTFA, you'll see that the inflated figure came, exaggerated by a factor of 10 due to a typo, from a government agency.

Except that if you RTFA, you'll see that not one but two figures were inflated, both by the same factor of 10. One type was £120bn instead of £12bn. The other was 4.73bn instead of 473 million. Two separate typos for the exact same magnitude?

Make It Stop

[DynaSoar]

Take this list (from CIBER site):

Dr Andrew Boyd Associate Research associate, information flow
David Brown Founding Director British Library. Journal publishing
Elizabeth A. Chapman Associate Deputy Director of Library Services, UCL
Andy Dawson Researcher UCL
Dr Tom Dobrowolski Founding Director University of Warsaw, web policy
Professor Barrie Gunter Director University of Leicester, mass communications
John Haynes Director Institute of Physics Publishing
Paul Huntington Senior Research Fellow UCL, data mining and web metrics
Hamid R. Jamali Researcher UCL, virtual scholar, digital information seeking
Professor Michael Mabe Founding Director Director, Elsevier Science, publishing strategy
Professor Michel Menou Associate Founding Director Consultant, information and development
Dr Rob Miller Researcher UCL
Professor David Nicholas Managing Director UCL, deep log analysis, digital information seeking and the evaluation of digital information systems/libraries
Dr Ian Rowlands Managing Director City University, information policy.
Bill Russell Founding Director Director, Emerald - marketing and sales
Chris Russell Associate Co-founder, eDigitalResearch.com
Dr Iain Stevenson Associate City University, publishing strategy
Dr Carol Tenopir Honorary senior research fellow University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Milverton Wallace Associate Consultant, NetMedia, new media
Professor Anthony Watkinson Founding Director Consultant, digital transition
Dr Berenika Webster Researcher University of Wellington, bibliometrics
Peter Williams Senior Research Fellow UCL, consumer health information
Richard Withey Director Independent Digital, new media strategies

Find bios/vitae for each. Find out what professional organizations each belong to.
Get the ethics policies from each.
For each that has an ethics statement regarding fabrication, submit a complaint about that person, attaching the work in question and subsequent research showing the falsifications.

Make copies of each such complaint and compile them into two volumes. Send one to the UCL ethic committee at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/staff/committees/ethics/ and one to the provost http://www.ucl.ac.uk/provost/ . Send copies to media outlets that display some leanings towards ethical behavior (as opposed to simply publishing expose type junk stories; you don't want to poison your own well). If they publish this, make copies of each and send them as follow ups to the ethics committee and provost as above.

Of course this requires that people care enough to do something more than simply publish stories about it saying how awful it is, and publish links and summaries elsewhere so those people can 'discuss' how awful it is. The proportion of stories and discussions regarding such awfulisms compared to submissions to ethics committees on science/journalism fraud indicates that damn near all people care more about talking about it than making it stop. Doing something about it doesn't require academic/scientific credentials, just a bit of work with careful attention to getting the facts right (ie. researching the sources back to the original). It needs to be good enough that the probable threats of libel lawsuits can be countered with accusations of barratry, as the facts presented serve as proof no libel occurred.

Regarding the Guardian's article: there was no science done here. Research, yes (very poor, yes) but science, no. The numbers tossed about are just that, not statistics in the scientific (inferential stats) sense. There's a tendency to call numbers used in support of statements 'statistics'. Such weak connotations do not add up to the denotation no matter how many times it is repeated. Even had there

The newspaper suicide pact

[Anonymous Coward]

Great blog post:
I think I'll remember last week as the moment when I finally knew, with a certainty approaching fatigue, that the newspaper industry - the business and passion that both shaped and warped me over the past 20 years - had chosen ritual suicide. The choice appears grimly reached and irrevocable.
http://xark.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/06/the-newspaper-suicide-pact.html