Thursday 11:51am (28th May 2009)
Piracy Numbers Based On Hunches, Not Actual Surveys..Techdirt report Michael Geist's recent discovery that Business Software Alliance (BSA) statistics around piracy in Canada, masqueraded as fact, were in fact made-up: "In digging deeper into the questionable claims of the report by The Conference Board of Canada that was basically a cut and paste from various industry groups, Geist noticed that the report relied on some BSA data. So he asked for more info on how the BSA determined the "piracy" rate of software in Canada. How many people were surveyed? What was the methodology? In response, Geist found out that no one in Canada was surveyed, and BSA (and IDC who created the report) simply made an educated guess, assuming the piracy rates weren't all that different than they were in past years. Yet this hunch, based on no actual data, is being used as a definitive source of piracy numbers in Canada? Even more noteworthy, both the BSA and The Conference Board report use these numbers to support the silly claim that Canada is somehow one of the worst offenders when it comes to supporting "piracy."
Of course, questionable piracy statistics provided by industry groups are nothing new, in fact we've seen this happen in New Zealand before. In a draft report to the Australian Attorney General they were called "self-serving hyperbole". Even with film production down 20.7% in 2008, the MPAA has reported a world wide 5.2% increase in box office profits last year.
With significant question-marks hovering over piracy statistics, before legislating to tackle a perceived problem one would hope that governments would conduct their own independent research to gain a more focused, accurate picture of the situation.
Of course illegal downloads occur, but with yet another example of fallible data on digital copyright infringement, we challenge legislators to question the statistics around piracy, and if possible to seek to obtain independent figures before legislating for a perceived scale of problem, rather than a definite one..
