How 136 People Became 7 Million Illegal File-Sharers

Barence writes "The British government's official figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK come from questionable research commissioned by the music industry. The Radio 4 show named More or Less examined the government's claim that 7m people in Britain are engaged in illegal file sharing. The 7m figure actually came from a report written about music industry losses for Forrester subsidiary Jupiter Research. The report was privately commissioned by none other than the UK's music trade body, the BPI. The 7m figure had been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m, gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software — in other words, only 136 people. That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.' The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on an estimated number of internet users that disagreed with the government's own estimate. The wholly unsubstantiated 7m figure was then released as an official statistic."

Comments

Re:Story meaning?

[sexconker]

You want a meaning?
The figure is LOW, if anything, but slashfags need their weekly circle jerk about how the government is evil, copyright is unjust, piracy isn't stealing, and information wants to be free.

It's Friday and we needed to get the nerds off before the long weekend. It was the best we could come up with.

We'll make up for it on Tuesday, though, with some drudged up FUD about some company doing something that nerds can rage over.

Re:Why the BBC rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the BBC rocks at disinformation.... On mainstream BBC (the one that most people watch) they don't bother with such niceties as the truth. But they will have a detailed program somewhere lurking in a basement somewhere that tells the truth (that few people watch).

This creates a false impression that the BBC is great, when in reality its mainstream news is very Fox News like.

You've not heard of Keith Olbermann then?

Re:Story meaning?

[BitZtream]

And this is a prime reason why 'statistics' are fucking retarded.

You assume that a 'random' sample will yield proper results because its random, and thats just something some retarded ignorant professor shouts at his students.

Its a sign of someone who doesn't understand entropy at all.

This is no such thing as random, sorry. There are some pretty unpredictable things from our prospective, but nothing is random.

Just as easily as a random sample can accurately reflect a population as a whole, it can equally be skewed to be a completely inaccurate representation of the real world.

Statistics as a rule, don't prove shit, taking 'samples' as an accurate representation of reality is retarded as anyone with half a grain of common sense can figure out. The only people who say otherwise are too stupid to realize that people teaching them things are often wrong.

Its a sample, random or otherwise, it should never be used as an accurate representation of reality, doing so just makes you ignorant and/or a politician.