Big 4 record label creative statistics
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- “As far as I’m concerned, everything from this industry is false, until proven otherwise.”
That’s Ben Goldacre (right) in Home taping didn’t kill music, his Bad Science post on music industry creative stats which, as we’ve pointed out many times before, have as much resemblance to reality as claims by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music that they’re being “devastated” by P2P file sharers.
So his comment doesn’t come as any kind of surprise. (The same also applies to the corporate movie and software industries. But that’s another story.)
Ben quotes a story in The Sun which has UK government sources as stating, categorically and unequivocally, that 7,000,000 Britons are file sharing thieves.
Say again? Seven million?
But if the government said it, has to be true.
“More than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today,” says The Sun. “Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material.”
In a post on the same revelation, “Is that based on corporate entertainment cartel stats?” – I wondered, going on:
“No. But it might as well have been. The fallacious ‘news’ comes from Britain’s Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, a jumped up, pumped up government bureaucracy which describes itself as a “Non-Departmental Public Body with the Intellectual Property Office as its sponsor department.
“Its role, it says, ‘is to advise Ministers and the Intellectual Property Office Chief Executive on the development of intellectual property (IP) policy’.”
But, I noted, that’s, “only after it’s cleared whatever it’s putting out through the corporate entertainment industry”.
‘Behavioural and attitudinal problem of young people, especially students’
Glynn Moody took a long, and very hard, look at Copycats? Digital consumers in the online age, produced by University College London’s CIBER for SABIP.
Its introduction concludes »»»
Much of the academic and industry literature covered, even the most recent, considers the issue of illegal downloading as a behavioural and attitudinal problem of young people, especially students. We have considered this evidence – often based on sample research groups comprising a few hundred students at a particular university – as helpful but narrow and historical. The downloading of unauthorised music and film files, to name but two types of digital content, has not decreased over the past five years, and indeed has grown in many places. It is questionable whether all the activity of unauthorised downloading is undertaken by young people and students alone, because we have seen very little evidence about the broader base of digital consumers of all ages in relation to attitudes, behaviour and issues of intellectual property; and almost none about post-University consumers of unauthorised materials. Did all of the students studied in research about illegal software downloading in the 1980s stop their illegal behaviour? What are the behaviours and attitudes of the early 1980s adopters of “illegal” downloading technologies in their twenty-first century middle age? More importantly: who are the almost seven million UK citizens (Music Alley, 2008) who download unauthorised content? For the year 2007/08 there were approximately 2.3 million students in higher education, and 175,000 academic staff (HESA, 2009). Who are the others? Are they all school children?
Who are they indeed?
‘Staggering – and complete piffle’
“Among other questions, one issue is to what extent the report manages to look objectively at the facts, rather than blithely accepting the highly-partial views of the media industry itself,” says Glyn, continuing »»»
The 85-page report is detailed, and as you might expect from an academic outfit, is fully referenced, which is excellent. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in this important field read the whole thing. But for those of you slightly more pressed for time, the executive summary gives a good flavour of its approach:
The backdrop to our research on online consumer behaviour – and the impacts and implications this has on legal practice, the content industries, and governmental policy – is one of vast economic losses brought about by widespread unauthorised downloading and a huge confusion about (or denial of) the definition of what is and is not legal and copyright protected. Industry reports suggest that at least seven million British citizens have downloaded unauthorised content, many on a regular basis, and many also without ethical consideration. Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10 billion (IP Rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs. This is in the context of the “Creative Industries” providing around 8% of British GDP. And the situation is not solely a British problem, but a global one. Downloading culture (Altschuller, 2009: unpaginated) “has forced society into a muddle of uncertainty with how to incorporate it into existing social and legal structures.” Altschuller adds that: “…music downloading has become part and parcel of the social fabric of our society despite its illegal status,” (emphasis added).
Just to make it clear – this is not simply an issue of music and film downloads alone. Software losses due to what is often described as “piracy” were, for example, $48 billion worldwide in 2007 (BSA, 2007); and in the UK the figure was $1,837,000 or approximately £1.25 billion. An exploratory CIBER investigation found vast quantities of films, music, software, e-books, games and television content available to download and share without cost. On one peer-to-peer network we found that at midday on a weekday there were 1.3 million users, sharing content. If each “peer” from this network (not the largest) downloaded one file per day the resulting number of downloads (music, film, television, e-books, software and games were all available) would be 473 million items per year. If the figure for each individual is closer to five or more items per day, the lowest estimate of downloaded material (remembering that the entire season of the Fox television series “24”, or the “complete” works of the rock group Led Zeppelin can be one file) is just under 2.4 billion files. And if the average value of each file is £5 – that is a rough low average of the price of a DVD or CD, rather than the higher prices of software or E-books – we have the online members of one file sharing network consuming approximately £12 billion in content annually – for free. These figures are staggering.
Staggering indeed – and complete piffle.
Back to Ben, “Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years,” he says. “So where do these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come from?”
He ferreted around and found the original report written [you guessed it] by CIBER.
He goes on »»»
On the billions lost it says: “Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10 billion (IP Rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs.”
What is the origin of this conservative figure? I hunted down the full CIBER documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed “background”, among five other points, it says: “Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10 billion and 4,000 jobs.” An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release. Genius.
But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73 billion items downloaded each year, worth £120 billion. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. Now before we go anywhere, this already seems rather high. I am not an economist, and I don’t know about their methods, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value. And someone downloading a £1,000 professional 3D animation software package to fiddle about with at home may not use it more than three times. I’m just saying.
In any case, that’s £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that’s still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax. Oh but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473 million items and £12 billion (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist. I can find no public correction.
Exaggerated by a factor of ten
SABIP, however, deeply concerned with protecting its credibility will, we can rest assured, have immediately severed all linkages with CIBER, at the same time issuing an urgent, updated, and suitably contrite press statement.
Not at all.
“I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of ten and were widely reported in news outlets around the world,” says Ben, adding:
“SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were.
“Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful.”
Jon Newton – p2pnet
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy! Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
June 8th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Epic Fun!
June 8th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
“Britain’s Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property”
Colleagues of the Conference Board of Canada?
June 9th, 2009 at 5:59 am
Editing Gremlins at work….
http://www.sabip.org.uk/sabip-ciberreport.pdf
Page not found error.
Anyone got a copy of the original report ?