College piracy stats wrong, MPAA admits
p2pnet news | Movies:- Yesterday, p2pnet ran an item saying Hollywood’s MPAA has been claiming 44% of domestic losses could be attributed to file sharing students.
The movie industry copyrightr enforcement organisation now says LEK, the company which came up with the number, got it wrong.
Dead wrong.
The figure should have been 15%.
But, no harm done. 15% is, “still significant,” says the MPAA.
Digital Journal ran the story is well saying:
“Hollywood loves to blame college students for the downward spiral of movie sales, which they attribute to illegal file sharing. They blame post-pubescent pupils for the financial gouge that has cut through the heart of the movie industry’s profit margins, saying illegal downloading is the root of all digital evil. The only problem is, the numbers cited by the MPAA were wrong.”
On the right, with apologies to DJ, is the pic which went with its story.
It says it all. As The Register’s headline summed it up:
MPAA admits movie piracy study is 29% full of @$#%
Meanwhile, “In 2004, the MPA commissioned a study to provide an accurate and detailed assessment of the film industry’s worldwide losses to piracy and the demographic profile of those engaging in piracy,” said the MPAA of the LEK report.
“The survey results are the most comprehensive picture of film piracy to date,” it promised, stating:
“The typical pirate is age 16-24 and male. 44 percent of MPA company losses in the U.S. are attributable to college students.”
However, as p2pnet said yesterday, the revelation that the MPAA messed up shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise.
“In Hollywood, lies and hype rule and now the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has again been show up for using inaccurate statistics to support its claim that its owners, the multi-billion-dollar Big Six movie studios, are being ruined by file sharers,” p2pnet posted in 2006.
However, this wasn’t in reference to the LEK’s current tardy disclosure that its report was deeply flawed.
Our story discussed a similar revalation dating back to 2006 and went on:
We were talking about a study by something called LEK which was dismissed by Britain’s Industry Trust for Intellectual Property Awareness (ITfIPA) as “inaccurate and out of date”.
The MPAA was contacted, “but declined to reply”.
The same study has again been shown up to be completely wrong, and this time Hollywood’s MPAA has been forced to admit it.
“The M.P.A.A. said the original figure, from a 2005 study, was wrong because of ‘human error,’ without elaborating,” says the New York Times, going on:
“In a statement obtained by Inside Higher Education, the association said it was taking the error ‘very seriously’ and vowing to investigate how it happened. But the association stuck to its offensive against college students:
” ‘The latest data confirms [sic] that college campuses are still faced with a significant problem. Although college students make up 3 percent of the population, they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of stolen movie products in this country’.”
Stay tuned.
Also See:
file sharing students – Huge Hollywood mistake in student download stats, January 23, 2008
Digital Journal – The Movie Industry That Cried Wolf, January 23, 2008
New York Times – Movie Industry Admits It Overstated Piracy on Campus, January 23, 2008
Inside Higher Education – Downloading by Students Overstated, January 23, 2008
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January 24th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Hmmm……I wonder when they’ll admit they lied about Canada being a prime source for camcorded bootlegs? Or their actual losses due to piracy, for that matter? The truth is finally starting to unfold, and if these corrupt assholes think they can continue lying through their teeth to spread bullshit propaganda, and use these made-up “statistics” as a scapegoat to terrorize their own consumers, they’re dead wrong.
January 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am
piratebayâs brokep has a piece too about numbers
http://blog.brokep.com/2008/01/24/estimation-constipation/
Note that there are only about 9 million swedes all together according to swedish sources
January 24th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
The discrepancy is more like 200 percent.
If the real number were 14 pecent and the given number was 44 pecent, the given number is about 3 times the real number.
Of course, the 14 percent is a ficticious number because at best, it is based on a reason why people did not buy something. Trying to find out why someone did not do something (see or buy a movie) is a dubious proposition best not done. Just have someone try to explain why he/she is not living in the moon. You can get a million different answrs, and all are valid.
My favorite guess as to why more people don’t not go to the movies or buy or rent dvs or music CD’s or go to concerts is that the quality of the product is not attractive enough and the hazzle and price is too great.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
even one movie pirate is one to many . . . just rent or buy your movies ppl
January 24th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Yeah. I remember when I was in full time education. I always had loads of my grant left over to buy masses of drugs, beer, food and porn, after the rent, course books and prostitutes. Having to actually rent or buy films every week might have stretched my enormous budget a little.
Heck, looking back now, if I had only skipped the prostitutes, I could’ve probably bought out the MPAA in a year!
January 25th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Which raises the most important question of all – do you buy one 99 cent hooker, or 99 one cent hookers with your iTunes money?
January 26th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
” even one movie pirate is one to many . . . just rent or buy your movies ppl ”
I do … second hand from used disk stores or pawn shops.
As long as the cartels continue their illegal practices and manipulation
of the court system, they will get none of my cash, and it’s also legal.
I guess a LOT of others are doing this as well. I wonder if the cartels will
ever admit how this practice is affecting them.