Blackmoor Vituperative

A study by the Australian Institute of Criminology revealed that software and music industries couldn’t explain how they calculated piracy losses, even though this data was used for lobbying efforts and in court cases (The Australian reports).

According to The Australian, the Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) – a body responsible for “investigative and intellectual property rights enforcement related services to the Australian music industry” did not know how piracy estimates were calculated as data it collected was processed by the IFPI in London. The MIPI manager commented that: “The reason … [she] wasn’t personally aware of how they are prepared is because they are compiled by the IFPI… They have a group that has been doing this for some time.”

Also the report noted that often the following misleading assumption is used to estimate piracy losses: a person who acquired pirate goods would otherwise have paid full price for the legal product. Moreover, unverified extrapolations were used by lobbyists to present the problem to the government.

Finally the report suggests that if these statistics are not thoroughly explained by the purveyors they should be withdrawn.

This study is a draft so far and the institute plans to check it further (after the criticism voiced by the industry) before it is handed over to the Australian government as “senior researchers disagreed with its conclusions”.

Piracy stats don’t add up, The Australian
New music ‘piracy’ statistics, p2pnet
Piracy losses fabricated – Aussie study, The Register
Australian Agency Questions Piracy Damage Valuations, Digital Music News

There’s a good reason the music industry can’t explain how they are calculating piracy losses. To my knowledge, there’s only ever been one serious large-scale research project conducted to try to calculate the direct effects of “illegal” downloading. The researchers’ conclusion was that peer-to-peer downloading’s effect on CD sales was so minimal that it was indistinguishible from zero.

This is yet another indication that the entertainment industry’s global push to expand their stranglehold on intellectual property rights is not about protecting creativity; it’s about the desire of a handful of global oligarchs to claim ownership of all forms of human creativity.

You can download a copy of the full study at: www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

(from AllOfMP3.com, Music industry fails to explain how the piracy losses are calculated)

I have been saying for years that the whole “losses from piracy” argument is based on fallacies and that it’s just smoke and mirrors so that the media robber barons can seize and retain control of our cultural future. In my opinion, this observation falls into the “water is wet and teen-agers are horny” category. But some people are so damned gullible that they’ll believe anything the Digital Rights Mafia says unless there’s an egghead study that tells them what anyone with eyes could see for themselves.