Govt-touted study turns 136 admitted file-sharers from sample of 1,176 households into the the much touted 7 million, but actual total could be as low as 3.9 million, and it turns out the figure was derived by research funded by the British Phonographic Industry which has been actively lobbying the govt for a crackdown on P2P.
The UK govt and music industry often state that 7 million people in that country regularly engage in illegal file-sharing, and thus there is a dire need to combat the problem in order to protect its creative content industries.
So a listener of BBC’s Radio 4 More or Less program e-mailed the show recently and asked them to look into whether the number is true or not being that so much is at stake. It turns out that not only is the figure bogus, but that the study that produced it was funded by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).
The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, a govt advisory body, first published the figure back in May as part of a study it commissioned from a team of academics at the University College London, a team called Cyber.
Upon further inquiry the team at Cyber says they took the number from work done by Forrester, a private research organization. Unable to find the 7 million figure in the Forrester paper they cited, which they oddly did no less than 4 times by the way, More or Less then sought out one of the report’s authors, Mark Mulligan, to get to the bottom of things.
Here’s where it gets even more confusing.
Mulligan says the figure doesn’t come from the paper cited by Cyber, but rather a different one he produced called the Jupiter Industry Losses Project. That research was entirely privately funded by none other than the BPI. The govt is thus using figures entirely concocted by a private business interest and interpreting them as gospel.
“So what some news reports have taken to be a kind of official statistic actually comes from research paid for by a trade association which has been lobbying the govt to crackdown on illegal file-sharing,” says BBC investigative reporter Oliver Hawkins.
Hawkins managed to finally get some of the raw illegal file-sharing numbers from a “reluctant” BPI and the figures are even worse than one would imagine.
The estimated number of illegal file-sharers is actually 6.7 million, not 7 million (it was rounded up), and is based on a questionable proportion of the UK’s estimated online population.
In 2008 they carried out a survey of 1,176 households that were connected to the Internet, and in that survey 11.6% said they had used illegal file-sharing software. That number was then adjusted upwards to 16.3% to reflect the assumption that not everybody would give a truthful answer.
When asked about this adjustment Mulligan said it “wasn’t just pulled out of thin air,” and it was, he says, “based on evidence.”
Even if this percentage were taken to be factual, its estimated online population is still questionable, further reducing the number of illegal file-sharers as a percentage of the whole. For the UK’s Office for National Statistics estimates that when the study was conducted in 2008 there were some 33.9 million people online whereas the BPI-commissioned study estimated the online population was 40 million.
So even if you take the 16.3% at face value and correlate it with the ONS’ figures it means that there were only 5.6 million total file-sharers in the UK. That’s 1.1 million less than what they say it is.
Remove the adjustment for underreporting and you get just 3.9 million, or almost half of what the UK govt claims.
The fact that the number of UK file-sharers varies as widely as 2.8 million makes the need for any sort of P2P crackdown look even more ridiculous than it already does, especially when also considering the music industry’s own economist recently concluded that revenue is up 4.7% since 2007!.
Being that the UK govt, Lord Mandelson in particular, and others have used the 7 million figure as a principle reason for the need for “urgent action” to be taken against illegal file-sharers it’s now time that it revisits the facts before making any decisions.
Stay tuned.
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Listen to the report in its entirety at BBC Radio 4′s “More or Less” (it’s about 7:45 in).
[Hat Tip]
fkn booyah, nice work MoL team whoot!