p2pnet news view MPAA | RIAA News:- What’s the difference between the RIAA, MPAA and BSA? - p2pnet asked rhetorically in November last year, answering, rhetorically:

“There is no difference.

“MPAA means Motion Picture Association of America, RIAA is Recording Industry Association of America and BSA is Business Software Alliance.

“All three are front organizations owned and maintained by vested entertainment and software interests to give the entirely false illusion that they operate in a fair, free and open market place.”

The point of the post was to suggest statistics and claims from any or all of these organizations are often unreliable at best, or completely fabricated at worst.

In August this year, “A federal judge is handing a Louisiana man a year in prison for pirating thousands of DVDs and CDs in a case highlighting the Motion Picture Association of America’s wildly varying valuation of pirated discs,” says David Kravets in Wired, continuing »»»

In the case of Tanner Hills of Louisiana, according to court records, (.pdf) an MPAA expert concluded that the 3,557 bootleg DVDs seized from the defendant’s Jefferson Parish apartment outside New Orleans was valued at $67,583. That’s $19 a disc for such films as Borat, Bambi, 300 and Premium.

And if you think those numbers are high, consider last year when the MPAA said 200,000 illicit DVDs seized in Australia were worth $83 per movie disc. Some 6,200 pirated discs were also found in Hong Kong that year, and the MPAA affixed value at $20 million, meaning each disc was worth $3,225.80. We’re not kidding.

For Hills, the inflated figures don’t really matter. The two counts (.pdf) of criminal copyright infringement to which he pleaded guilty require an illicit cache of $2,500 or more.

But it matters when the MPAA, the movie studios’ lobbying arm, declared Tuesday that movie piracy costs foreign and domestic producers, distributors, theaters, video stores and pay-per-view operators “$18 billion annually as a result of movie theft.”

In Hollywood, lies and hype rule and not too long ago, “On the Internet front, it has been estimated that as much as two-thirds of Internet bandwidth in this country is consumed by peer-to-peer traffic, with much of that volume attributable to movie theft,” MPAA boss Dan Glickman told a US senate judiciary committee, failing to say where he got the number from.

He also tried to spuriously link copyright infringement with with drug trafficking, stating it’s, “more lucrative than selling heroin for many criminal gangs”.

The number should have been 15%, not 44%

Another p2pnet story suggesting MPAA stats might be, well, a little questionable, said, “An intriguing new detail has emerged in the growing scandal involving statistics used by Hollywood’s MPAA to pillory American students who are being accused by the entertainment cartels of being primarily responsible for dwindling sales.

“Central is a company called LEK, a ‘consulting boutique’. It supplied a report to the MPAA which then used it to claim, ‘44 percent of MPAA company losses in the U.S. are attributable to college students’.”

However, the number proved to be horribly incorrect, which presumably didn’t surprise Britain’s Industry Trust for Intellectual Property Awareness (ITPA). Almost two years earlier it’d described the same report as “inaccurate and out of date”.

LEK later admitted the figure should have been 15%, not 44%, and Educause took it even lower, saying 3% would probably be even more accurate.

And it was also revealed Kevin Mayer, a senior Walt Disney executive, ran LEK’s global media and entertainment practice, said Portfolio.

Before he left LEK to join Disney in June 2005, his responsibilities included “the creation of comprehensive anti-piracy strategies for motion picture studios and trade associations,” according to his bio.

‘Piracy’ is Number One

Cinema Blend’s Stuart Wood picked up on the CANADIANS ARE !@#$^*& THIEVING CAMCORDING MOVIE PIRATES! story.

According the MPAA, “Canada is supposedly responsible for 70% of all world piracy,” he observed, going on, “Yep, your friendly neighborhood Canadian supposedly accounts for 7 out of every 10 pirated movies. Well in a new report by the MPAA, they also claim that New York is responsible for 40% of world piracy. Four out of every ten pirated movies.”

But how, Wood wondered, could you have 110% of anything?

Nor is the art of creative statistics new.

The music, movie and software cartels claim ‘piracy’ is a Number One problem not only for themselves, but for the world as a whole, we said in a 2006 story.

The industries have, “fabricated a multi-headed monster by turning a simple commercial concept - copyright infringement which in truth, affects only them - into a huge, international conspiracy involving millions of their own innocent customers around the world, and genuine criminal counterfeiters,” we said, continuing »»»

So successful are their continuing dis- and misinformation propaganda campaigns that they’ve been able to use them to dragoon entire governments and police forces into acting as industry enforcers.

However, the cartels are also frequently accused of fabricating statistics upon which they base their claims and according to the Havocscope global index of illicit markets, far from being at the top of the pile, movie and music piracy are way, way down the list, ranking 16th and 20th, respectively.

And even those positions are highly questionable given that in both instances, to reach them, Havocscope relies on statistics tainted more than somewhat by the industries concerned.

The movie industry figures are, for instance, based on, “a study released by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA),” bolstered by further stats from the Institute for Policy Innovation which, starting from an MPAA $6.1 billion claim, says the, “total impact of movie piracy in terms of lost jobs and tax revenue costs the US economy $20.5 billion”.

But the latter numbers were also put together with, “some funding from NBC Universal and the MPAA,” says The Washington Post.

And guess where the music statistics come from?

The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), owned by EMI, Warner Music, EMI and Vivendi Unversal, the members of the multi-billion-dollar Big Four Organized Music family who singly and collectively claim they’re being “devastated” by their own customers who are, they scream, ‘criminals’ and ‘thieves’.

Hang on a minute —-Institute for Policy Innovation? That rings a bell. Oh Yes! I described the IPI study cited by the MPAA as “deeply flawed,” suggesting its attempts to qualify music industry claims that files shared equal sales lost were just so much hogwash.

IPI president Tom Giovanetti (right) and I had an interesting discussion on it.

Meanwhile, the post cited above continues »»»

‘Pirated’ web videos come in at #5 in Havocscope list, but even the figures which put them at the number five spot are, to be kind, considerably less than convincing.

“The exact figure of piracy on web video sites is difficult to determine,” Havocscope admits ….

Inflated by 2,000%

Nor are MPAA  fabrications confined to statistics centering on alleged losses supposedly due to file sharing.

In 2006 the MPAA embarrassed itself and its owners with a look-how-clever-we-are report, said p2pnet, explaining the Hollywood crime-buster “stamped out” (its words) New Century Media in Los Angeles, calling it an “illegal DVD/CD replicating plant” and seizing “$30 million in illegal stampers and DVDs”.

But owner Jennifer Yu accused the MPAA of slander, saying she was in the duplicating business. And that was it. No connection to ‘pirates’ on land or at sea.

And the MPAA “stamped out” claim notwithstanding, New Century Media was still very much open and doing business.

So how did the cartel pseudo cop unit arrive at its “$30 million in illegal stampers and DVDs” figure, widely quoted as hard fact by the mainstream media?

Easy, said the MPAA.

All they had to do was estimate the value of the DVDs seized during the raid, “as well as the value of DVDs that could be produced using the equipment”.

Jennifer Yu said the $30 million (based on DVDs seized and not any criminal activity) was inflated by 2,000%.

Cabinet-level copyright czar

Back to Kravets’ Wired post, “Los Angeles officials recently adopted an eviction ordinance for pirates based largely on MPAA numbers. Now Congress, pressed by lobbying by the MPAA and Recording Industry Association of America, is considering creating a Cabinet-level copyright czar and granting the U.S. attorney general the authority, for the first time, to file civil lawsuits for copyright infringement,” he said, adding:”And in case you’re wondering, the RIAA valued the 2,896 CDs seized from Hills’ apartment at $39,791, or $13.74 a disc. Artists included Tupac, Lil Wayne, Snoop Dog, Jay-Z and R Kelly.

“The RIAA said Tuesday that ‘global theft of sound recordings cost the U.S. economy $12.5 billion in lost revenue and more than 71,000 jobs and $2 billion in wages to U.S. workers.’

“The RIAA floated the numbers and the MPAA touted its numbers when urging Congress to adopt the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, (747-page .pdf) which requires universities to ‘develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as to plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity’.”

The RIAA, huh?

In 2003 it instigated, and took part in, a New York Police Department raid which, RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss “estimated,” resulted in the seizure of “the equivalent” of 421 CD burners.

How can you have the equivalent of 421 CD burners? - wondered the late Bill Evans.

So he asked Weiss and it turned out the raiders had seized 156, and not 421, burners.

“We stated that the raid was the equivalent of 421 burners, as we need to put these operations in perspective based on burning capacity and output, not the number of physical slots for the discs,” Weiss explained.

“Since they burn 4x burners - it is roughly 4xs the numbers of burners.”

Er, well, um …….

5% ahead of last year’s $1.4 billion

But Hollywood and the labels are being devastated. Aren’t they?

Not really. The impoverished (according to the MPAA) multi-multi-multi-billion-dollar Hollywood movie industry is rolling in dollars, reporting mind-boggling income and record breaking attendances, p2pnet said in June.

“Even though the industry set a record pace with its first $4 billion summer last year, the results are showing signs that 2008 could beat that record,” said MarketWatch, going on:

“Figures from box-office tracker Media By Numbers through June 15 show that the business raked in $1.46 billion in U.S. receipts for the first six weeks of what is considered the summer season, nearly 5% ahead of last year’s $1.4 billion.”

What’s, “even more remarkable about the 2008 season is that attendance is ahead of last year’s pace,” said the story, adding:

“Often, the industry sees an uptick in revenue due to higher ticket prices but attendance is either flat or down. So far this year, 206.2 million tickets have been sold, compared with 202.8 million at the same time last year, an increase of 1.6%, according to Dergarabedian. The average ticket price is up 20 cents to $7.08.”

But the Big 4 labels are in big trouble! Right?

“[…] our assumption that consumer spending on DVDs in 2008 would decline at an accelerating rate (exacerbated by the far slower than expected rollout of next-gen DVD) now appears incorrect,” said Pali Research’s Rich Greenfield recently.

Consumer spending on DVDs has in fact been, “surprisingly strong” in the first half of 2008 —- up nearly 2%, he stated unequivocally.

And yet, “Global sales of recorded music fell by 8% in 2007,” according to figures released in June by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), said The Economist.

They blamed 70% of the decline on “file-sharing” software, the story goes on, pointing out, “Industry groups have sued thousands of users of such software, and have supported legislation to criminalise it.”

In reality, the legislation was bought-and-paid for by the cartels and only one person —- a Minnesota single mother targeted by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) the Big 4’s American enforcer —- has actually appeared in court. And her case will certainly be re-heard.

There are statistics, damned statistics and entertainment cartel statistics.

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under MPAA News, RIAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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