Public Knowledge founder Gigi Sohn tackles Bono's recent NYT op-ed, in which the rock star suggested we follow China's lead on net-filtering technology to limit the scourge of file sharing. Ms. Sohn writes:

But the most absurd thing about Bono's endorsement of draconian copyright enforcement is that it undermines just about everything else he professes to stand for. Look at the activities and goals of One, the nonprofit organization Bono co-founded. One is "committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa." It "campaign[s] for better development policies, more effective aid and trade reform. We also support greater democracy, accountability and transparency to ensure policies to beat poverty are implemented effectively." Among the specific issues One works on are the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDs and malaria, increasing access to quality education and ensuring trade policies that "create economic growth and opportunities for the poorest people."

If Bono truly cares about poverty, education, health care and fair trade in developing regions like Africa, he should be against draconian intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement regimes and for more balance. Numerous studies (including from the World Bank) have concluded that the strong IPR regimes exported from the West to the South (many through trade agreements) mainly benefit industrialized countries. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is the cost of re-aligning national laws to fit these regimes and the cost of enforcement itself. Resources that could be devoted to education, or health care or fighting poverty are instead spent on protecting transnational media companies.

Bono's "One" Ignorant Idea (Public Knowledge, via EFF)

Bono, in a New York Times top-ten essay filled with of Brilliant Ideas That Will Fix The World If Only They'd Listen To Moi, says "Intellectual Property Developers" are doomed because of filesharing. Snip:

But we know from America's noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China's ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it's perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product."

Ah yes, the "noble effort to stop child pornography," always good to lead with that one when you're proposing draconian net-trawling tactics. After all, those efforts did stop child pornography, right? And surely what's good for squashing China's dissidents is good for the world! Cory's on holiday, but you can bet he had some pithy goodness to tweet, after the jump.

Bono: Ten for the Next Ten (New York Times)

Last.fm … the music streaming service is unlikely to halt downloading

Someone convinced the record and movie and TV industries that there is way of letting someone listen to audio or watch video over the internet without making a copy. They call this "streaming" audio, and compare it to radio, and contrast it with "downloading", which they compare to buying a CD.

The idea that you can show someone a movie over the internet without making a copy has got lots of people in policy circles excited, since it seems to "solve the copyright problem". If services such as Hulu, Last.fm and YouTube can "play you a file" instead of "sending you a file", then we're safely back in the pre-Napster era. You can sell subscriptions to on-demand streaming, and be sure that your subscribers will never stop paying, since they don't own their favourite entertainment and will have to stump up in order to play it again.

There's only one problem: Streaming doesn't exist.

Oh, OK. Streaming exists. It is a subset of downloading, which comes in many flavours. Downloading is what happens when one computer (a server, say) sends another computer (your PC, say) a file. Some downloads happen over http, the protocol on which the web is based. Some happen over BitTorrent, which pulls the file from many different locations, in no particular order, and reassembles it on your side. Some downloads take place over secure protocols like SSH and SSL, and some are part of intelligent systems that, for example, keep your computer in sync with an encrypted remote backup.

Streaming describes a collection of downloading techniques in which the file is generally sent sequentially, so that it can be displayed before it is fully downloaded. Some streams are open-ended (like the video stream coming off your CCTV camera, which isn't a finite file, but rather continues to transmit for as long as the CCTV is up and running).

Some travel over UDP, a cousin of the more familiar TCP, in which reliability can be traded off for speed. Some streaming servers can communicate with the downloading software and dynamically adjust the stream to compensate for poor network conditions.

And of course, some streaming software throws away the bits after it finishes downloading them, rather than storing them on the hard-drive.

It's this last part that has the technologically naive excited. They assume that because a downloading client can be designed in such a way that it doesn't save the file, no "copy" is being made. They assume that this is the technical equivalent of "showing" someone a movie instead of "giving them a copy" of it.

But the reason some download clients discards the bits is because the programmer chose not to save them. Designing a competing client that doesn't throw away the bits – one that "makes a copy" – is trivial.

All streaming involves making a copy, and saving the copy just isn't hard.

Does this matter? After all, if the entertainment industry can be bought off with some pretty stories about a magical kind of download that doesn't make a copy, shouldn't we just leave them to their illusions?

What harm could come from that?

Plenty, I fear. First of all, while streaming music from Last.fm is a great way to listen to music you haven't discovered yet, there's no reason to believe that people will lose the urge to collect music.

Indeed, the record industry seems to have forgotten the lesson of 70 years' worth of radio: people who hear songs they like often go on to acquire those songs for their personal collections. It's amazing to hear record industry executives deny that this will be the case, especially given that this was the dominant sales strategy for their industry for most of a century. Collecting is easier than it has ever been: you can store more music in less space and organise it more readily than ever before.

People will go on using streaming services, of course. They may even pay for them. But people will also go on downloading. Streaming won't decrease downloading. If streaming is successful – that is, if it succeeds in making music more important to more people – then downloading will increase too. With that increase will come a concomitant increase in Big Content's attacks on the privacy and due process rights of internet users, which, these days, is pretty much everyone.

If you want to solve the "downloading problem" you can't do it by waving your hands and declaring that a totally speculative, historically unprecedented shift in user behaviour – less downloading – will spontaneously arise through the good offices of Last.fm.

There are more problems, of course. Streaming is an implausible and inefficient use of wireless bandwidth. Our phones and personal devices can be equipped with all the storage necessary to carry around tens of thousands of songs for just a few pounds, incurring a single cost. By contrast, listening to music as you move around (another factor that has been key to the music industry's strategy, starting with the in-car eight-track player and continuing through the Walkman and iPod) via streams requires that you use the scarce electromagnetic spectrum that competing users are trying to get their email or web pages over. Count the number of earbuds on the next tube-carriage, airplane or bus you ride, multiply it by 128kbps (for a poor quality audio stream) and imagine that you had to find enough wireless bandwidth to serve them all, without slowing down anyone's competing net applications. Someday, every 777 might come with a satellite link, but will it provide all 479 passengers with enough bandwidth to play music all the way from London to Sydney?

What's more, streaming requires that wireless companies be at the centre of our daily cultural lives. These are the same wireless companies that presently screw us in every conceivable way: charging a premium for dialling an 0870 number; having limits on "unlimited" data plans; charging extra for "long distance" text messages. They're the same wireless companies whose hold-queues, deceptive multi-year contracts, surprise bills, and flaky network coverage have caused more bad days than any other modern industry.

Why would we voluntarily increase our reliance on expensive, scarce wireless bandwidth delivered by abusive thugs when we are awash in cheap, commodity storage that grows cheaper every day and which we can buy from hundreds of manufacturers and thousands of retailers?

Especially when every streaming song creates a raft of privacy disclosures – your location, your taste, even the people who may be near you and when you're near them – that are far more controllable when you listen to your own music collection.

Finally, there's the cost of going along with the gag. The more we pretend that there is a technical possibility of designing a downloader that can't save its files, the more incentive we create for legal and technological systems that attempt to make this come true. The way you hinder a downloader from saving files is by obfuscating its design and by creating legal penalties for users who open up the programs they use and try to improve them. You can't ever have a free/open source downloader that satisfies the desire to enforce deletion of the file on receipt, because all it would take to remove this stricture is to modify the code.

An incentive to obfuscate code, to prohibit third-party modifications and improvements, and to weld the bonnet shut on all the world's computers won't actually stop downloading. But it will have anti-competitive effects, it will reduce privacy, and it will slow down innovation, by giving incumbents the right to control new entrants into the market.

Hard problems can't be solved with technical denialism. The market has spoken: people want to download their music (and sometimes they want to stream it, too). The supposedly for-profit record labels could offer all-you-can-download packages that captured the law-abiding downloader, and then they could retain those customers by continuing to make new, great music available. It's been 10 years since Napster, and the record industry's hypothesis that an all-you-can-download regime can't work because users will download every song and then unsubscribe from the service is not borne out by evidence. The fact is that most downloaders find cheap, low-risk music discovery to be a tremendous incentive to more consumption, as they discover new music, new artists, new songs and new genres that tickle their fancies.

Selling customers what they desire is fundamental to any successful business. If Big Content can't figure out how to do that, then we can only pray for their hasty demise, before they can do too much more damage to humanity's most amazing and wonderful invention: the internet.

Britons' love for filesharing is here to stay – and Peter Mandelson had better get used to it

• Cory Doctorow
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 17.54 GMT
• Article history

Stop that copying! Peter Mandelson wants us to believe that a 70% reduction in illicit filesharing is a reasonable goal. Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images

There's a lot to hate about Peter Mandelson's controversial Digital Economy Bill, but there's one provision that perfectly captures the absolute, reality-denying absurdity of the whole enterprise. That titbit is the provision that holds the Bill's most drastic measures in reserve, only to be used if Britain's illegal filesharing doesn't drop off by 70% within a year of the main part of the Bill coming into force.

The idea that, at some time in the future, the volume of unauthorised copying will somehow drop off at all (let alone by an astounding 70%), is, frankly, barking. For that to happen, Britain's general capacity for copying would have to decline faster than the increase in the British desire to make unauthorised copies.

Where does Britain's capacity to copy spring from?

First, from the increase in the speed of computers: faster computers can copy faster and better. They have faster busses, can access faster drives, and can undertake complex copying tasks (synchronising or partially synchronising two drives over a bus or network, encrypting files, downloading the same file from many sources at once).

Second, from the increase in the speed and capacity of storage media.

Storage media is increasing in density and speed and declining in price at an astonishing clip, and shows no sign of slowing. In 1994, I had the job of setting up a 9GB storage array for a pre-press shop. This array weighed about 70kg, cost $250,000, and took a skilled technician a whole day to set up and another day to correctly install.

I just counted up the SD, micro-SD, mini-SD and USB thumbs in the coffee-cup on my desk into which I throw such media when I receive it with new phones, cameras, etc, and discovered that I have about 700GB worth of storage that barely comes a third of the way up the cup. This media is so cheap that I literally don't know what it cost, because it was thrown in for free with my various devices. My postal scales tell me that it weighs 221g, all told.

And when it comes to high-speed, "bulky" storage (like the 500GB hard drive I bought on Amazon when I got my latest laptop), you get half a terabyte crammed into 100g for £54. If you've still got a desktop PC, you can get a larger, cheaper 500GB drive weighing 710g for £44, a 7200RPM model that can transfer 65MBps.

Third, an increase in the speed and availability of networks. The number of places we can expect to connect devices to the internet is going up very fast – though not as fast as storage or processor speed. There are tens of thousands of cafes, restaurants, hotels, airport lounges, and offices that offer connectivity to all comers.

Fourth, an increase in the versatility of networks and network tools.

Filesharing tools have gone from the primitive, easily monitored and abstruse (IRC or the early Napster) to a very easy, attack-resistant architecture that was built in response to entertainment industry attacks. What was once relatively benign – it would have been trivial to charge for access to Napster and audit what was downloaded to pay rightsholders – has become utterly virulent. The entertainment industry's reliance on the courts for a cheap and dirty fix to all its problems has mutated filesharing into a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that has no one to sue except for individual filesharers (and the most avid music filesharers are also the most avid music everything – CD buyers, concertgoers, bootleg collectors … When you live your life for music, you do everything musical in spades).

Fifth, an increase in the general technical competence of Britons. It's easy to see that the younger you are, the easier you find networks to negotiate and use. A generation has already come of age with the net all around them all the time, and there's a half a generation above them (myself included) who were early adopters. But now that everything is better with the net — from paying your gas bill to getting permission from the council to build a shed — everyone is learning. Libraries teach OAPs everything they need to know to type "Batman Returns download" into Google.

Peter Mandelson wants us to believe that a 70% reduction in illicit filesharing is a reasonable goal, but for any reduction to occur in filesharing, all the above factors will have to fall faster than Britons' desire to fileshare grows. It's not enough to take out the networks – just ask my old students at the University of Southern California, whose weekend hard-drive parties featured singing, guitar-playing, beer-drinking, and the synchronisation of terabytes' worth of data on the drives they brought over to their mates' houses.

When solid state hard-drives capacious enough to hold every song ever recorded can be had for a fiver at the corner shop (a mere few years from now), spying on networks will simply not suffice as a means of containing copying. When every OAP has been taught to use the net, when every homeless person has a scavenged netbook, when protocols have mutated again to hide their users' transactions with state-of-the-art cryptography, there will be no penalty harsh enough to make the tiniest dent in filesharing.

Mandelson argues that Britain's Digital Economy will be based on the contrafactual premise of a steady decrease in computer speed, drive capacity, technical competence, network versatility and network ubiquity. Of course, the real digital economy is in those British companies that figure out how to thrive whether or not copying occurs – companies that use networks to reduce their costs, reach larger customer bases, and provide services whose demand and profitability grow with network use, companies such as Last.fm or Moo.com.

These companies' businesses are inconceivable without the net, but they also risk being collateral damage in Mandelson's war on the British internet. Just increasing the liability for copyright infringement (and creating a duty to police user-submitted files for infringement) could bankrupt either company overnight. How would Moo sell business cards with your personal photos on them if they could be sued into oblivion should those photos turn out to infringe copyright?

Mandelson is standing up for the Analogue Economy, the economy premised on the no-longer-technically-true idea that copying is hard. Companies based on the outdated notion of inherent difficulty of copying must change or they will die. Because copying isn't hard. Copying isn't going to get harder. This moment, right now, 2009, this is as hard as copying will be for the rest of recorded history. Next year, copying will be easier. And the year after that. And the year after that.

And don't suppose for a moment that other countries are in the dark about this. Right now, the future of the world's economies hangs on each government's ability to ignore the Analogue Economy's pleading.

Countries that declare war on copying – and on all those businesses that are born digital – are yielding their economic futures to countries that embrace it, creating a regime that nurtures the net and those who use it.

If Mandelson wants to provide a subsidy to the Analogue Economy, he could order them to license their works to ISPs at a fixed fee, so that ISPs could opt in to offer Big Content's copyrights to their users and pay a fair price. There are many difficulties and headaches with this approach, but it has the advantage of having a hope in hell of succeeding (blanket licensing is already used to manage copyright in radio broadcast, live performance, sound recordings and other technologies); that is quite a big lead over the mad idea that somehow British copying will fall off by 70% (or fall off at all) in the next 12-18 months.

• The Guardian, Wednesday 25 November 2009
• Article history

Laws primarily work by consent, common sense and persuasion. Peter Mandelson's attempts to shock and scare internet users into obeying copyright laws will backfire, and meanwhile undermine rights we all hold dear – including the right to be presumed innocent (Editorial, 23 November).

My European parliamentary colleagues recently stood up for these rights in the new telecoms package. We firmly believe that Mandelson's proposals do not fit with the new law's statement that "measures may only be taken with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy. A prior fair and impartial procedure shall be guaranteed, including the right to be heard of the person or persons concerned."

Lacklustre "appeal" mechanisms and punishments based on uncertain evidence do not, in our view, fit with this article. We, therefore, welcome the Guardian's justified outrage, and that of the 11,000 individuals who have signed the petition against these proposals on the Downing Street website.

Caroline Lucas MEP

• The Guardian, Monday 23 November 2009
• Article history

The digital economy bill is misnamed. A more honest title for the legislation, recently introduced in the Lords, would be the copyright protection and punishment bill. It is less about creating the digital businesses of the 21st century than protecting the particular 20th century business models used in music and film.

The bill is narrow in vision but dangerously broad in creating sweeping ministerial powers to punish digital pirates. It boils Digital Britain down to three Ms – media, music and movies – myopically ignoring the pioneers of new technology, and showing a blind spot for all creativity outside the so-called creative industries. Digital Britain is much more than digital media – there are the start-ups of London's Silicon Roundabout, the great success story of Cambridge chip designer ARM and the small businesses all over the land using the net to open up opportunities. Instead of empowering digital Britons, the bill follows the lead of music and movie corporations, who already apply a presumption of guilt to their customers. Instead of treating the web as a platform of possibilities, it recasts it as a tool for mass theft.

The only digital thing about this bill is the cut-and-paste facility it grants the secretary of state to redefine the copyright laws and increase maximum penalties. The government may argue, with some force, that it needs flexibility to ensure the rules keep pace with technology. But granting this administration – or any future one – such latitude to rewrite crucial laws on the fly, with only the merest figleaf of parliamentary oversight, is a dangerous precedent, and one sure to inspire future abuses – of democratic as well as digital rights.

Vague laws create opportunities for unintended consequences and offer an open invitation for aggressive lobbying. If it is understood that the secretary of state has it within his gift to change the rules on a whim, then Rupert Murdoch, for instance, could soon be advancing his war against Google in Whitehall.

While Finland enshrines web access as a human right, this bill legislates plans to deprive users of access. It will force internet service providers to become copyright police, obliging them to provide lists of violations to copyright owners. After warnings, violators will have their service crippled, or even cut off. All this will drive up the costs of web access, by piling duties on providers. Add the more defensible surcharges to pay for next generation services, and Digital Britain risks becoming a land beset by an even deeper digital divide. Instead of building on a positive vision of Digital Britain, the government has capitulated to the fears of music and movie moguls struggling to defend their multimillion-pound businesses.

Submitted by Andy_R on 31 October 2009

Recently we've seen a wide array of campaigns and discussion forums about pirate politics. Billy Bragg has started a discussion blog, the Open Rights Group have done a lot of good work to raise awareness and talk sense about disconnection, and of course they have been a lot of petitions set up on the Number 10 website aimed at pointing out how wrong the government are to wage war on their own citizens over file sharing.

Now, a new player has entered the field of pirate politics, with a campaign against disconnection. Andrew Heany's petition against disconnections is different in one major way from all the others because it has the backing of the company he works for. Since he's Executive Director of strategy and Regulation at Talk Talk, this means we now have one of Britain's biggest ISPs actively supporting pirate policies.

Talk Talk sponsors the X factor, with an ad campaign of shapes drawn with light ("brightdancing") starting and finishing every ad break. Regardless of your opinion of the show, I'm sure you'll agree it's a memorable big budget campaign that reaches millions of people. The adverts have concentrated on happy smiling faces and funny images until now, but the latest variation on the advert shows something more sinister, the lights draw a wire and a pair of scissors poised to cut it, representing Lord Mandelson's plan to cut off internet access to whole families on the basis of unproven accusations.

The Pirate Party UK approves of the Dont Disconnect Us campaign, and as party leader, I urge you all to sign their petition. Not because it's the best, or the first, or the most radical, but because it's backed by big business, and we all know that while Lord Mandelson seems happy to blindly to ignore the Police, MI5 and 70% of the UK population when they call for an end to 3 strikes and disconnection, he does actually listen to big businesses.

By Ian Youngs Music reporter, BBC News

Media regulator Ofcom could be given powers to punish file-sharers

An alliance of music stars, songwriters and record producers has spoken out against UK government proposals to kick file-sharers off the internet.

Persistent file-sharers could have their internet accounts suspended in an attempt to crack down on piracy.

But Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien, a member of the Featured Artists' Coalition (FAC), said: "It's going to start a war which they'll never win."

The FAC said "heavy-handed" tactics may turn fans away from music for good.

The FAC, a pressure group formed to represent performers, has joined forces with the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild.

In a joint statement, the three bodies of music-makers said they "vehemently oppose" the plans to punish file-sharers.

That is in contrast to major record labels and many other commercial arms of the music industry, who have welcomed the suggestions.

Phonographic Performance Limited, which licenses recorded music and music videos for public performance and broadcast said the majority of its 40,000 members were "not household names" and "they deserve to be protected from theft".

PPL chairman Fran Nevrkla added: "It is time we had an online world more akin to the High Street than the Wild West."

His sentiment was echoed by the Creative Coalition Campaign - a partnership between trade unions representing people working in the creative industries.

"Our creative sector produces world-class content, bringing joy to countless people across the UK and the world, but this can't be sustained if illegal file-sharing persists," said a statement from the coalition.

"There has never been a more critical time to take bold action against those who are threatening the livelihoods of everyone working in the entertainment sector."

We don't want to make enemies of our fans Dave Rowntree (right) Blur

Blur drummer Dave Rowntree said the FAC was against file-sharing, but that previous attempts at legal action had turned fans against the music industry and the artists themselves.

"We don't want to make enemies of our fans," he told BBC News. "The sensible thing to do is to try to see how we can monetise all this file-sharing activity, which is evidence of a lot of interest in music."

It would be very difficult to find out who was swapping files and whether those files contained copyrighted recordings, he warned.

Singer and fellow FAC board member Billy Bragg described the measures as a "very heavy sledgehammer".

"We're concerned that, in an age where there is much greater competition for attention, these proposals are in danger of driving young people away from the idea of listening to music," he said.

"As musicians, we're worried about that."

Many young fans had discovered his music through file-sharing, Bragg said, and paid for his music in other ways, such as buying gig tickets.

"We should be encouraging people to become music fans, and whether we like it or not, illicit downloading does encourage people to become music fans."

 

There are more positive ways of dealing with this without totally upsetting your consumers Patrick Rackow British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors

Speaking of the proposal to cut off pirates, Ed O'Brien predicted: "It won't work. It's as simple as that.

"I was talking to a serial file-sharer the other day, who is a friend. He downloads films and he hasn't paid for music for six years.

"I asked his opinion of it and he laughed. He said, 'even if they cut me off I'll still be able to do it'. It's something you do not want to take on, so move on."

Geoff Taylor, of the British Phonographic Industry, which represents record labels, says the government is right to consider "temporary suspension as a last resort, where accounts are repeatedly used illegally despite warnings".

"Most people across the music sector recognise the serious damage that illegal file-sharing is doing to investment in new music," he added.

But Patrick Rackow, chief executive of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, said sanctions would upset fans, rather than driving them towards legal services.

"The industry has to look forwards, not backwards," he said. "There is a huge problem here and we've got to find a solution to it. I don't know what this solution is, I don't think anyone does.

"There are more positive ways of dealing with this without totally upsetting your consumers."

He suggested that in the future, legal music download services could be based on radio. In that scenario, fans would not pay for every song but may pay a subscription or hear adverts, as with existing services such as Spotify or We7.

'Widespread concerns'

In its Digital Britain report, originally published in June, the government set a target to reduce file-sharing by 70% in the first year.

That report gave media regulator Ofcom until 2012 to consider whether "technical measures" - such as reducing broadband speeds or blocking access to download sites - were necessary.

However, according to a statement from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) released last month, that time-frame is now considered "too long to wait".

Stephen Timms, minister for Digital Britain, said in August: "We've been listening carefully to responses to the consultation this far, and it's become clear there are widespread concerns that the plans as they stand could delay action, impacting unfairly upon rights holders."

Speaking in response to the FAC's concerns, Mr Timm subsequently added that "any action would follow a clear series of warnings and there would be a fair and effective appeals process".

UK Music, an umbrella body representing the British music industry, said it was "pleased that government is proposing accelerated and proportionate action to meet their stated ambition of reducing illegal file-sharing".

"Throughout this debate, UK Music has voiced concerns that the original time-frame of proposed legislation, and particularly the trigger mechanisms that would grant Ofcom reserve powers to implement technical measures, would have failed to meet these ambitions," a statement said.

How UK Government spun 136 people into 7m illegal file sharers

Posted on 4 Sep 2009 at 14:54

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 BBC has revealed.

The Radio 4 show More or Less - which is devoted to the "often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers" - decided to examine the Government's claim that 7m people in Britain are engaged in illegal file sharing.

The 7m figure comes from the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, a Government advisory body.

 

As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions

 

The Advisory Board claimed it commissioned the research from a team of academics at University College London, who it transpires got the 7m figure from a paper published by Forrester Research.

The More or Less team hunted down the relevant Forrester paper, but could find no mention of the 7m figure, so they contacted the report's author Mark Mulligan.

Mulligan claimed the figure actually came from a report he wrote about music industry losses for Forrester subsidiary Jupiter Research. That report was privately commissioned by none other than the music trade body, the BPI.

Fudged figures

As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions.

The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was 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.

It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The report's author told the BBC that the adjustment "wasn't just pulled out of thin air" but based on unspecified evidence.

The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on the estimated number of people with internet access in the UK. However, Jupiter research was working on the assumption that there were 40m people online in the UK in 2008, whereas the Government's own Office of National Statistics claimed there were only 33.9m people online during that year.

If the BPI-commissioned Jupiter research had used the Government's online population figures, the total number of file sharers would be 5.6m. If the researchers hadn't adjusted their figures upwards, the total number of file sharers would be only 3.9m - or just over half the figure being bandied about by the Government.

UK-based readers can listen to More or Less on the BBC iPlayer here

(Thanks to David Johnson for the tip-off)

 

Author: Barry Collins