Can we trust official governmental figures on file sharing? According to an enquiry by the BBC, the answer to this question is no. A recent governmental report puts the number of UK file sharers at the hefty figure of 7 million, however, a closer examination into this figure by the BBC Radio 4 Show 'More or Less' has uncovered the reality behind this figure. The show, aired on Friday, reveals that the figure comes from questionable research commissioned by the music industry.The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, who published this recent report for the government, obtained the figures from a team of academics at the University College London, who, in turn, pulled this figure from a paper released by Forrester Research. The BBC team tracked down the relevant paper, but could find no mention of the 7 million figure, and so went on to contact the author of the report, Mark Mulligan.
Mr. Mulligan claimed the number quoted in the report was taken from research he published regarding music industry losses, which was commissioned by the British Phonographic Industry, the trade association for the British record industry.
Further investigation revealed that this figure was based on some questionable assumptions and wild approximations. Firstly, this number was rounded up from a figure of 6.7 million, taken from a 2008 survey into UK internet usage. This questionnaire was responded to by 1176 UK households with an internet connection, of which just 11.6% admitted to having used file-sharing software. This equates to only 136 people.
From this figure of 11.6%, an adjustment was made upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The author of the report told the BBC that this change was made based on evidence, but declined to inform the team of the source of his information used here.
From this figure, a final calculation was made, to scale up to the total number of people in the UK with web access. However, yet another incorrect figure was used, with the assumption that there were 40 million internet subscribers in the UK, the figure of 7 million file sharers was generated. The true figure, according to the UK Office of National Statistics is closer to 33.9 million.
Once all the assumptions and adjustments are removed from the calculations, a more believable statistic of 3.9 million users of illegal file sharing networks is found. This is just over half of the figure published by the government. With this in mind, can we really trust the figures we find online regarding the size of the file sharing problem?
No wonder the BBC repeatedly gets a gag order from the British government to hide the truth about anything & everything from the public, from war to politics, to gay royals to internet trends.
1. Charlie Brooker is a very funny man.
2. In a large majority of the episodes, there are 20 seconds or so filled with a gag order and System of a Down playing in the background.
No surprise at all that the number of file sharers is blown way out of proportion.
If its connected in 'any way' to the music and movie co's and their rep's
NO WE CANT TRUST ANY FIGURE'S.
1176 x 11.6% = 136.416
Some people only download the occasional song whereas some people are continually downloading several movies every day. There's a huge difference. Is there no way of working out how many of what sort of file is being downloaded?
Then you have to include the amount of people that just don't do it all and then this is where the loss factor comes in, how many of those individuals who download either one song or severla gigs of things a day would have gone out and bought said item in the first place?
Those are the figures they should be looking at!
Well this is the British government with a Labour majority, seeing as some believe they can build a Duck Island on
their expense account, then they cannot be trusted on anything.
their expense account, then they cannot be trusted on anything.
The Duck Island was a tory MP not a labour, if your gonig to slander parliment at least get your facts right.
their expense account, then they cannot be trusted on anything.
The Duck Island was a tory MP not a labour, if your gonig to slander parliment at least get your facts right.
I know it was a conservative fool.
Thats why I put government with a ''Labour majority''.
All elected MP's govern.
Therefore my facts are correct, I mentioned Duck Island as it was so bizare.
+1
You're not going to survey 100% of the population for a report, that'd be absurd. The only time you'd ever try to "survey" 100% of the population is for an election, even then good luck getting more than 70% of the population to participate. Even if you did survey 100% of the population, there are no guarantees they'd tell the truth anyways so when dealing with people, there is always a larger margin of error regardless of whether or not you survey few or many people. The real question isn't whether results are accurate, but why they even try at all.
Opinion polls are not really reliable to begin with because of what you said.
yep. it's always the cats doing the downloading
Report shows that 136 from 1176 people were sharing files and we need to find the ratio (k) of file sharers.
Probability of k=11.6% is ZERO!!! Wake up people.
How come no one mentioned even something as simple as confidence intervals?
"There are lies, Damn lies and statistics"
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