MPAA info: old and inaccurate
p2p news / p2pnet: 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.
“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 recently told a US senate judiciary committee, failing to qualifying his statement.
He also used the occasion to try to spuriously link copyright infringement with with drug trafficking, saying it’s, “more lucrative than selling heroin for many criminal gangs”.
Now, “The MPAA’s recent LEK study into intellectual property theft has been dismissed by the UK’s Industry Trust for Intellectual Property Awareness (ITPA) as inaccurate and out of date,” says N2N News.
“The dismissal came after discrepancies between that report, and figures the ITfIPA itself publicises were highlighted. Stefanie Riese-McCartney, spokesperson for the trust, said of the Lex study ‘This information is so old now (research done in 2004) that I’m afraid it’s lost its currency’. She then went on to say that a British Video Association study from November 2005 was more accurate as it was more recent. The study consisted of ‘face-to-face interviews with 2,000 members of the public in GB of 15 years+’.
“The MPAA were contacted, but declined to reply.”
Like the music industry’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the corporate software companies’ BSA (Business Software Alliance), the MPAA routinely trots out specious statistics which are published by the mainstream media as accurate, just as though they emanated from reliable and credible sources.
“Apparently, though, there is some confusion as to what the actual public line should be, since at two points Miss Riese-McCartney defended the differences in values (£108.5M for the BVA study, $175M/£98.5M for the MPAA study) as ‘due to the fact that the methodologies employed were completely different’,” N2N News says, adding:
“Although how they can use two different methods to measure the same thing, have a 10% difference, and still believe either to be accurate beggars belief. Unless, then, there has been a schism in the nature of reality, one, or possibly both, figures are wrong. Fortunately, the ITPA does also give a 3rd reason in the same set of statements.
“The figure is used on the piracy is a crime website to make the point that piracy is making a huge impact on many levels, not just losses to copyright owners. Although it’s certainly important to be accurate, we have a common aim with the MPA and other organisations to raise awareness of the harm done by piracy.” – in short, whilst accuracy is nice, getting our point across is nicer.
“However, this is not the first time the ITPA has revealed information that has broken with the broadly established copyright agency gameplan. In December 2005, the ITPA let slip that they considered public domain material copyrighted.”
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Also See:
N2N News – UK copyright lobby discredits MPAA study, June 23, 2006
The San Francisco Chronicle – Google tests commercials on its video service, June 22, 2006
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