Australian govt draft says piracy stats are made up
Written by Smaran on November 08, 2006A private draft prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology for the Attorney-General’s Department says that piracy stats aren’t backed up by fact and that copyright holders “failed to explain” how they came up with financial loss figures.
The draft questions whether the techniques used by copyright holders (record companies etc.) to determine piracy statistics are valid and if the data they come up with is accurate.
The Business Software Association, an international software body, claimed that in the year 2005 piracy in Australia cost them $361 million. The draft says these figures are “unverified and epistemologically unreliable.” It even goes so far as to call some of the stats used by copyright holders “absurd,” and adds that “of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law.”
According to the draft, the RIAA’s Australian arm, the MIPI did not know how they calculated piracy stats, because the IPFI never told them. Strange? Maybe that’s just how things work with international organisations.
The reasoning behind the statements in the draft is that anti-piracy organisations calculate losses by counting each pirated good that is sold. They are making the assumption that each person who buys a pirated CD, for example, would have bought an original one instead. This cannot be backed up, as many of those people might not have been able to buy, or might not have bought the original CD.
The draft concluded with a statement asking for statistics that cannot be verified to be withdrawn. “Either these statistics must be withdrawn or the purveyors of these statistics must supply valid and transparent substantiation.”
The truth on the other hand: Why Most Artists Profit from Piracy!
Previously: Software Piracy in 1985
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9 Responses
It’s no news that MPIAA/RIAA etc has false statistics (and knows it), but that someone finally starts to qustion their methods are excellent news.
I get the feeling these organisations are stating “total downloads” for their potential financial losses, where as in actual fact 85% of the people that downloaded a song/album/movie or whatever would never have bothered to purchase that item in the first place.
Sounds about right. This reminds me of the great film hackers, where the government was a lame as anyone. And that was based on a true story.
@R2K, I love that movie :D
Angelina Jolie :p (I)
:) Glad to see the goverment is waking up.
I wouldn’t be buying ANY music (if I couldn’t download it) and wouldn’t be interested enough to. Even if I could afford it and could afford the fuel to travel 200k to the more respectable dealers, I’d be lucky to find 5% of what I was looking for and the rest is unavailable so they tell me, or would need to be ordered, and I’d have to make another trip to pay top dollar for them at a later time.
On top of that, what I do download these days is mostly what I’ve never heard of, and most is not available in my area or would be deleted or out of print. In the past I downloaded what I knew and liked, but I already owned it on vinyl and tape, and just wanted a better copy and a backup.
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