Barence writes "The British government's official figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK come from questionable research commissioned by the music industry. The Radio 4 show named More or Less examined the government's claim that 7m people in Britain are engaged in illegal file sharing. The 7m figure actually came from a report written about music industry losses for Forrester subsidiary Jupiter Research. The report was privately commissioned by none other than the UK's music trade body, the BPI. The 7m figure had been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m, gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software — in other words, only 136 people. That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.' The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on an estimated number of internet users that disagreed with the government's own estimate. The wholly unsubstantiated 7m figure was then released as an official statistic."
I actually had several feelings about this summery, because:
1) Usually pro-filesharers try to make it sound like filesharing is usual activity and try go for most or 70-90% user share 2) The summary tries to paint this study bad because it "downsides" the amount of filesharers 3) The rant about examining only 1,176 people for the study - in which case the same kind of tv viewer statistics and other studies are made in what case.
So could someone please explain *why* is it a questionable research. It is like every other study where you study small amount of people and make estimates based on it to reflect whole population. Usually this amount of people also gives somewhat correct results on the whole population. Theres some error margin, but its close enough.
So what is the point of this story? That statistics researches use only minor subset or people to do their research instead of asking from everyone? They always have.
So could someone please explain *why* is it a questionable research.
1. the same size is small.. probably too small to make the claims they did. 2. they altered the numbers on an estimate of how many people fileshare on the assumption that the number was under-reported. 3. conflict of interest... it's like the tobacco industry sponsoring studies claiming that smoking doesn't have anything to do with lung cancer... there is significant reason to believe that the study carries significant bias in favor of their conclusion and must at the least be repeated by other sources.
So what is the point of this story? That statistics researches use only minor subset or people to do their research instead of asking from everyone? They always have.
N. real statistics researchers know that this study has numerable crippling flaws and should not be held as gospel by anyone. Even a first year stats student can see it. The reason this story is important is that it may influence governmental policy and it's flawed... That's dangerous.
It doesn't really make sense to claim "sample size is small" for an 1,100-person sample. If the sampling was done in a random, unbiased manner, that size sample gives a margin of error of +/- 3%. If there are flaws in the sampling method, that's another thing, but the sample size alone doesn't seem problematic, unless you need accuracy better than +/- 3%.
Oh I forgot to note this... anyway it addition to other potential flaws TFA says
11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software
emphasis mine. They admitted to using file sharing software not pirating goods via said software... The study is effectively making the assumption that filesharing = copyright infringement. Also from TFA:
The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on the estimated number of people with internet access in the UK. However, Jupiter research was working on the assumption that there were 40m people online in the UK in 2008, whereas the Government's own Office of National Statistics claimed there were only 33.9m people online during that year.
Even if the study did get the sample size correct the conclusion would still be nearly 30% wrong owing to their false assumption of the number of people with net access. neglecting the distinction between filesharing and copyright infringement TFA estimates that the actual number is between ~30 and ~50% lower than the study claims.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday September 04, @07:53PM (#29319619)
The study is effectively making the assumption that filesharing = copyright infringement.
I have a very hard time believing that the vast majority of people that use any filesharing application do so exclusivley for legit and non-copyright infringing purposes. Given the vast quantity of content, I seriously doubt that very many people go through any sort of hassle to determine what is legit and what is not, which results in virtually everyone obtaining material that is copyrighted, regardless whether they know (or care). Given that, I think its a fair guess on their part that yes, most people that claim they are using file-sharing software do so to obtain material illegally.
I just don't understand the stance that most people on this board seem to take regarding this issue. How can everyone be so supportive of what very obviously amounts to theft? It appears to me that somehow people think it is their "right" to obtain copyrighted material for free. I just don't buy for a second that people who claim to only use file-sharing apps for legitimate purposes only actually do so.
If you do indeed use all file-sharing applications for 100% legit purposes, please educate me what you use these services for that makes them so very essential to cause these very emotional posts here.
I just don't understand the stance that most people on this board seem to take regarding this issue. How can everyone be so supportive of what very obviously amounts to theft?
not everyone does obviously... most reasonable slashdotters advocate for reformed copyright pertly because of the unenforceable nature of longer copyright terms. many such as myself support the concept of a shorter more reasonable copyright term that does what the constitution requires: encourage the advancement of the arts.
If you do indeed use all file-sharing applications for 100% legit purposes, please educate me what you use these services for that makes them so very essential to cause these very emotional posts here.
most of the anger is directed toward the music/movie industry's response to piracy- weaken/destroy fair use, demonize all p2p [possibly restricting its use in the future out of fear] suing people as a scare tactic, excessive/un-constitutional fines, DRMed media etc...
most of the anger is directed toward the music/movie industry's response to piracy- weaken/destroy fair use, demonize all p2p [possibly restricting its use in the future out of fear] suing people as a scare tactic, excessive/un-constitutional fines, DRMed media etc...
...I don't see why these tactics are unreasonable...
So, just so that you can protect your "copyrighted content" from being stolen by someone other than me, you believe that it is "reasonable" to use bogus or flawed "research" to fool the government into a) taking away my legal rights (fair use); b) criminalizing software that can be and is used for legal purposes (P2P); c) abuse our legal system (suing people as scare tactic/impose excessive/unconstitutional fines); and d) crippling your "copyrighted content" so that I cannot exercise my right of fair use after I have purchased your "copyrighted content" (DRM/refer back to a) )?
It is even more difficult to attach a value to the legitimate uses of file-sharing networks, but if you can point me at examples of how file-sharing systems have a positive economic impact on anyone, please let me know.
Really? So you don't see value in a content provider being able to reduce operating expenses by distributing their content via P2P? Just because you are too lazy to do a simple search using any common search engine doesn't mean such examples [pbworks.com] don't exist. And why exactly does it have to have a positive economic impact on anyone - why does it have to have any economic impact at all? There are many things that have neither a positive economic impact nor any economic impact whatsoever, should those be illegal too?
Why would the solution to something that is not easily enforceable be to make it legal?
because it doesn't work? why are our police resources being used to enforce extended copyright law when it is neither enforceable nor in the public interest to do so?
With this particular issue, it simply became trivial for virtually anyone to obtain copyrighted material illegally
hence the law is unenforceable- that is to say that it can't be enforced without far more draconian measures that violate other rights.
Nobody is going to stop the advancement of the arts if it is made more difficult to share copyrighted content
all it has to do is discourage the advancement of the arts relative to an alternative solution. In that case the copyright system as it is would be unconstitutional in the US.
As someone who makes a living creating copyrighted content, I don't see why these tactics are unreasonable.
those tactics are often illegal, rights violating and unconstitutional. suing people for 10,000 x damages is a violation of the 8th amendment. various practices by the RIAA/MPAA are illegal including but not limited to violating the DMCA, abuse of the legal system, fraud and entrapment...
but if you can point me at examples of how file-sharing systems have a positive economic impact on anyone, please let me know.
live cds, distribution of software patches, advertising which ADV films uses P2P to distribute advertising clips for their anime media, distribution of creative commons licensed materials etc...
ALL CD stores but one have been driven out of business, and virtually everyone I know has stopped purchasing CD's
I'm sure that had nothing to do with single tracks being sold on Itunes, the poor state of CDs released today or the recession.
What does an "error of 3%" mean? Does it perhaps mean there is only a 50% chance (assuming normal distribution) that the proportion of filesharers in the total population is somewhere between 8.6% and 14.6%?
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday September 04, @07:17PM (#29319303)
A margin of error of +/- 3% is the Maximum margin of error for a random sample of 1100 drawn from a large enough population at the 95% significance level (actually its really +/-2.95%), i.e this is the margin of error when the observed % is 50% , The margin of error is less when the observed % approaches 0 or 100%.
In the case of an observed % of 11.6 the margin of error is +/-1.9% so it is 95% likely that the population figure is between 9.8% and 13.5%
Just as easily as a random sample can accurately reflect a population as a whole, it can equally be skewed to be a completely inaccurate representation of the real world.
If by "just as easily" you mean "with an enormously lower probability", then yes. But then, that's what a statement of margin of error says.
Statistics isn't all that complicated, and what a statistical measure means can be both demonstrated and proven. You don't need to get all faux existential about how "it's all just a bunch of crap, man". You don't know what you're talking about.
Also, entropy? No such thing as random? Really? Don't inject physical phenomena you clearly don't understand in a discussion about pure mathematics.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday September 04, @06:49PM (#29319065)
1. the same size is small.. probably too small to make the claims they did.
First statistics lesson I ever had, first thing the professor did was make an estimate based on 10 people about the whole population. He was correct, by the way. He went on to rant that anything that uses large amounts of people (by which he meant more than at most a few dozen) was not proper statistics. If you simply count everybody, it should be called "counting", you see, not statistics.
2. they altered the numbers on an estimate of how many people fileshare on the assumption that the number was under-reported.
And since they are right that the number turned out to be bigger in other studies, slightly. It seems a reasonable adaptation. It's easy to say it's unreasonable, of course. But they are absolutely correct that the number is most likely smaller. So how much should they adjust it ? Like I said, it seems a reasonable adjustment. Not absurdly high, not absurdly low.
3. conflict of interest... it's like the tobacco industry sponsoring studies claiming that smoking doesn't have anything to do with lung cancer... there is significant reason to believe that the study carries significant bias in favor of their conclusion and must at the least be repeated by other sources.
There don't exist studies that have no bias. Either research is funded by companies, or it's funded by government. Both have serious axes to grind, mostly pertaining to political ideology. If business intrest groups would not fund research we'd never have even the semblance of unbiased research that we have.
By the way, who should pay for studies ? Obviously the government has a vested interest in more legislation. The ifpi (us dept) has a vested interest in creating legal instruments to counteract filesharing. And the filesharers have a vested intrest in more "privacy", and legal instruments against ISPs (for the same reason a thief wants privacy, obviously, let's please not start the "what about those who only share openbsd", we all know that's not the filesharers being talked about).
How about we do the sane thing, and let all of them fund studies. Then read them all, and see what we believe to be true.
Just because people are biased, by the way, does not mean the truth can be biased. We are simply limited to imperfect instruments for reading the truth. Truth is absolute, and the number of filesharers is just a single number, not 2, not 5. And yes, we'll probably need a better definition and classification than "filesharers". The effects of filesharing are negative for artists (certainly for pop artists), and especially for the "music industry". There can be little doubt about that. How much damage is done, is anyone's guess. But by criticizing their observations, AND listening to them criticize our observations, we can hope to get closer to the real truth.
And since they are right that the number turned out to be bigger in other studies, slightly. It seems a reasonable adaptation. It's easy to say it's unreasonable, of course. But they are absolutely correct that the number is most likely smaller. So how much should they adjust it ? Like I said, it seems a reasonable adjustment. Not absurdly high, not absurdly low.
Here's where I find a major problem. You do not fudge your data. Period. These other studies may show higher numbers, but do we have proof they weren't fudged as well?
There's too many stories about companies performing pharmecutical trials and then throwing the data away because it didn't present a positive light.
If you're going to adjust numbers, you better have a damn sound reasoning for it rather than "we have a hunch people lied, so..."
If they're going to "adjust" the numbers, why did they even bother doing the research at all? Why not just come out and say,"We didn't like what the numbers said, so we threw them away and we're making a WAG with some bullshit we're pulling out of our ass." I understand that they're a research (read "marketing") company, and so are constitutionally incapable of telling the plain truth because they could burst into flames, but it would be a new experience. And fun to watch!
This is almost as cliche in arguments of statistics as the car analogy is on slashdot, and it's the sign of a scoundrel. If you actually had a first year stat student's understanding of stats you'd know where the weaknesses actually are, and where all the rest of the smoke blown in this discussion goes laghably wrong.
So let's apply some first year stats to the issue.
First, the sample size. Whether it is numerically large enough to be useful is a matter not only of it's size but also the number of positive results. IOW, a sample size of 1176 is too small if you found 3 of what you're looking for, but if you found 136 (11.6% of 1176), you have plenty of samples. The question is then only whether you had a representative sample.
My next concern would be precision. Using data with three or four significant digits (136, 1176) to make conclusions to seven significant digits (11.56463%) is silly, but that doesn't seem to have happened here. The only number in all of this that is fishy is the 16.3% number. To get three significant digits they'd have to know the number of lying households to that precision. If they had another study that determined this number they might very well have a number to that precision, but I'm assuming they just guessed.
That's still not a problem. If you guess, you run your confidence interval through your formulae (here it's a simple product) to put a range on your results. If it's a from-your-ass guess you might put a 100% failure estimate on your low end (i.e. there might be no lying households at all) to arrive at a conservative range. Here, it looks like they used an estimate of 40%. They should have (and might have; I didn't RTFA) run the un-adjusted 11.6% through the formulae to get a conservative low-end range.
Anyway, the number they finally used was 7%. One significant digit. That doesn't imply the same precision as, say, 6.7% would. In fact, if their figure for the number of lying households really was accurate to one digit (i.e. 35-45%) then rounding their final result to one digit was the correct procedure. If it was just a guess they should have run the absolute low estimate (probably, zero lying households) through to get a range.
So, with actual first year stat knowledge it's possible to actually state what might be wrong with the study, and not resort to "any first year stat student" hand-waving. It's clear that the most-cited criticism (the sample size) is the result of ignorance and group think, not actual knowledge of statistics.
Your criticisms are largely valid, but I still think the sample size was too small. After all, they couldn't know before they did the study what percentage would answer what way... not unless the study was rigged.
Of course, it also depends on what the purpose is. If it were for marketing, then this might be a quite acceptable procedure. In that case a large amount of error wouldn't cause significant problems to anyone. But if it's being used to lobby for laws, then it's just that it won't cause any pro
Survey sizes of around 1000 are pretty standard. If you run the survey and get 3 positives out of 1000, you say "Oh shit, sample size is too small", then run the same survey with 5,000 or 10,000 people to catch a larger number people you are targeting - i.e. we're looking to see what percentage of people practice illegal file sharing, we need to find at least a decent number of illegal file sharers so we know our survey is accurate.
It's not a matter of knowing what you'll get before hand or rigging the stu
The summary tries to paint this study bad because it "downsides" the amount of filesharers
I presume by "downsides" you mean "reduces"? Well the summary says "That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.'" So they actually UPPED the number of filesharers. This is objection #1 to "good research":
1. You do a survey to objectively measure the support of your hypothesis
2. The survey of a tiny sample indicates that filesharers are a pretty low percentage
3. You "adjust" this number -- otherwise known as "fudging the data" -- to better reflect your own hypothesis.
The same tactics in any scientific endeavor would get your papers retracted, your funding canceled, some sort of disciplinary action initiated, etc.
The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers? What if they only polled home internet users, but then used the "total number of internet users" -- which includes corporate subscribers -- to come up with their 11mil number? There are other possible, non-numerical issues too. What if the respondents confused downloading from bittorent with downloading from iTunes?
If you want many other examples of "bad science", read Ben Goldacre's blog [badscience.net]
About 60 million people in the UK, sample size of 1,176, confidence interval of 96% gives a margin of error of 2.99%. So, it's 96% likely that they got within 2.99% of the right answer (to the question of how many people admit to it).
I hate seeing this "that's too small a sample size" objection to every single study, from people who clearly don't know enough about how sample sizes work.
Nice calculator, I think the GP's main point though was that there is no evidence of a properly selected sample. You would be right in saying that the sample size has very little to do with anything compared to whether the sample is biased or not.
The point was that the sample size has almost no bearing on the accuracy of the survey provided it is truly representative of the overall population.
If you can get a sample size of 10 that is representative of a population of 60,000,000 people, you'll have a pretty accurate survey. The reality is, that's not possible in most cases. You'll generally have more than 10 demographics of varying percentages of the total population, making 10 simply too small. 1000, however
The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers?
You don't seem to understand the way good polling and statistics work. If you already have solid data on the demographic makeup of your population, it does not take a very large sample size at all to get accurate results. A sample size of 1000+ is more than enough to come within 3% accuracy (plus or minus) for any given study provided you already have good demographic information. To be accurate with a small sample size, you do NOT want to choose your survey takers at random, at least not completely. Sp
Yes, it makes a difference. When the lobbyists stand in front of lawmakers, those lawmakers want to know the real size of the problem. If the industry's lobbyists have to say, "We think we are losing almost a million pounds each and every year to piracy", lawmakers are going to be mildly concerned. However, if they lie, and claim that they are losing BILLIONS of pounds, those lawmakers realize that the tax collectors are losing a huge sum of money.
When you want action, you always exaggerate your losses a
To me, the number is meaningless in itself. The fact that government agencies have been using the number is the issue. Either they knew that the number was wrong or they didn't bother checking it. Both possibilities can point to incompetence or malice and reflect very badly on the people responsible.
You might be happy with government by making shit up and gut feelings but for the rest of us this is a good example of why government has no respect.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday September 04, @06:19PM (#29318751)
Whenever you estimate a statistic like that, you should also indicate the level of uncertainty surrounding the estimate. Why are they not reporting the upper and lower bounds of the confidence interval surrounding that estimate?
Whenever you estimate a statistic like that, you should also indicate the level of uncertainty surrounding the estimate. Why are they not reporting the upper and lower bounds of the confidence interval surrounding that estimate?
Perhaps because it's hard to come up with confidence intervals when you admit to fudging your own data by bumping the estimate up by almost five percentage points.
They think that a single copy of a song is worth over a hundred thousand dollars too. They claim to lose more in revenue each month than the GDP of most countries. All because of those dyyyeaaarrrn pirates. Enron looks positively boring in comparison to the accounting techniques the recording industry uses. None of this is news. About the only people that buy this crap are judges and legislators -- the rest of us are almost universally of the mindset that a bag of potato chips has more value than most of the recording industry's portfolio.
Indeed, let's look at the maths - supposing each person only shares 24 mp3s. By US standards at least, that's a cost of $1.92 million. So with 7 million file sharers, that's $13.44 trillion.
Using file-sharing software does not equate to sharing files illegally. I admit to using BitTorrent to download Fedora ISO's, and there's nothing illegal about that.
Some of the estimation steps might be sketchy, but the basic practice of estimating a population proportion from a sample of that population is not particularly questionable. That's how almost all studies of populations work, because taking censuses of all people in a country is rarely feasible. We have century-old statistical theory on how to put bounds on the sampling error, too, assuming the sample was indeed random.
You could have a whole slew of these stories if you really objected to that basic methodology, e.g. nearly every estimate of N million people suffering from a disease or disorder is based on a sample.
If there was some previous result that only 2/3 of filesharers admit it when asked, then an upwards revision by 1/3 in an estimate would be defensible. A "hunch" is not quite as good evidence. of course.
I was objecting mainly to the "how 136 people became 7 million" title, which to my ears reads mainly as a criticism of the sample size. But whatever the problems with this estimate, the sample size wasn't really among them.
Is it ok to change "11.6%" to "16.3%" based on a "hunch"?
I'm not a statistician, this is an honest question
IAAS, and the answer is no. That goes for the GP as well -- no one is contesting estimation theory, just that the fundamental assumptions are so grossly unmet in this "study" as to render it meaningless. And as someone else already commented, it's dangerous here because it's going to dictate public policy.
If you're going to "adjust" your objective findings, based on some bizarre assumption that a certain percentage of people will lie about file sharing, then why do a survey at all if not to create mathematical/sciency-sounding smoke and mirrors?
Not but you need some basis if you are going to make such an adjustment. There are ways to determine the rate of sampling error for instance and then use that. In this case that might be to much effort or get you into legally murky waters so what an honest researcher would write something like this:
In my sample of XXXX, YY responded that they sometimes used p2p software in an illegal fashion. Based on this the number of extra legal file sharers in the total population would be ZZZZZZ. I would not expect
136 out of 1176 people in households with internet connections admitted to having used file-sharing software (source: the summary) 18.3 million households in the UK had internet access at time of polling in 2009 (source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=8 [statistics.gov.uk] )
136/1176 * 18.3M ~= 2.12M
Not sure if "having used file-sharing software" means that they downloaded / distributed at least 1 item - say, a song - via said software and that they had no actual rights to do so (you know, as most people use file-sharing software to distribute Linux distros, or have simply 'used it' but didn't actually download or upload anything... *cough*)...
But let's presume it does.
Then let's take the low price in iTunes UK of GBP 0.79 per song, then the music industry 'lost' ('cos obviously people had no intention of buying that song that they didn't download / distribute because they were downloading a Linux distro instead *cough*) about GBP 1,671,897.96.
This is yet another example as to why the BBC is the finest broadcasting and journalistic organisation on the planet (I've never worked for them, sold to them or have any other financial connection other than the license fee).
They actually investigated something created by an industry group and found it to be bollocks and then reported it. The BBC are arguably the most "socialist" organisation in the democratic world (funded by a tax on everyone for the benefit of everyone) and yet they still question and challenge everything.
The US seriously needs something that questions vested interests and rubbish statistics as much as the BBC. Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are just comedians and FoxNews is just comedy.
Given a choice between the first amendment and the BBC, I'll take the BBC; its demonstrated more freedom of speech in a week than the US media has in a decade.
Oh come on, the BBC have reported this number many times since it was first used and you sing their praises because Radio 4 happens to do a show devoted to statistics? I wonder just how much time they will devote to debunking this statistic considering how many times they have quoted it.
Just because the BBC is better than the US networks doesn't mean we should be proud, personally I'm appalled at how low the bar is set.
You can also avoid paying the licence fee if your TV can't receive over-the-air pictures, e.g. if it is disconnected from the aerial.
There was once a "radio licence", you can still see a reference to it in one episode of Monty Python, but this was phased out when almost nobody owned a radio but not a TV.
In the future, I expect the TV licence will be extended to include Internet connections as well, since those can now be used to receive BBC programmes too. At that point, we will see if the BBC can continue
You only need one license, you can have as many tellies as you like. Portable tellies used in caravans and the like will be covered by the license for your home as well.
If you have two houses, you will need two licenses though, afaicr - which is why students away at Uni need to buy a license - including if they're in halls - even though their permanent residence might still be their parent's house.
I find the BBC great value and love it dearly. I suspect people will say that's because I'm white, middle class and liberal or something.
That's what I was thinking. The summary makes it seem that estimating the number that high is outrageous. I certainly wouldn't wager any money that it's significantly higher than actual piracy.
> Work backwards from the undisputed declining sales figures of the recording industry.
The main reason for declining sales is the fact that CD sales during the 90s were artificially boosted by people replacing records and tapes with CDs... then replacing them again when remastered CDs were released a few years later. It was a once-in-a-lifetime event for the recording industry that won't be repeated during our lifetimes.
People re-bought CDs they already owned in analog (or optimized-for-analog CDs) because they represented an epic improvement in quality by just about any meaningful standard over the analog media they replaced. Everything that's come out since CDs has only been cheaper, shittier-sounding, or intolerably-crippled by DRM.
Here's an idea for the music industry: ditch the DRM'ed formats, and roll out a music format on DVD media with 96KHz 32-bit stereo PCM. Make the discs gold-colored, call it something like "X-fi", and sell them for $24.95. You'll win on all counts -- genX'ers will go back into highschool mode and buy them to show off how rich they are and/or pretend they sound sufficiently better than 16-bit CDs to justify spending ~twice as much on them, and the fact that every disc will be ~4-8 gigabytes will serve as self-limiting DRM for the next decade or so. Just make sure they still have the MOST compelling consumer benefit intact (and reason why people who buy CDs still DO buy CDs): it's a flawless first-generation master to use for making all your "working" copies for everywhere else.
When you know the total population of the UK is roughly 30 million households, that's a fair chunk of the population. (total population is roughly 60 million people)
Out of the total population, only 18.7 million have broadband [statistics.gov.uk]. Guess roughly 40% of the population is a pirate then. We should make it legal, government being there for the populace and all that.
Story meaning? (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually had several feelings about this summery, because:
1) Usually pro-filesharers try to make it sound like filesharing is usual activity and try go for most or 70-90% user share
2) The summary tries to paint this study bad because it "downsides" the amount of filesharers
3) The rant about examining only 1,176 people for the study - in which case the same kind of tv viewer statistics and other studies are made in what case.
So could someone please explain *why* is it a questionable research. It is like every other study where you study small amount of people and make estimates based on it to reflect whole population. Usually this amount of people also gives somewhat correct results on the whole population. Theres some error margin, but its close enough.
So what is the point of this story? That statistics researches use only minor subset or people to do their research instead of asking from everyone? They always have.
Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because statistics are hard and outrage is easy.
Parent
Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Story meaning? (Score:4, Informative)
1. the same size is small.. probably too small to make the claims they did. 2. they altered the numbers on an estimate of how many people fileshare on the assumption that the number was under-reported. 3. conflict of interest... it's like the tobacco industry sponsoring studies claiming that smoking doesn't have anything to do with lung cancer... there is significant reason to believe that the study carries significant bias in favor of their conclusion and must at the least be repeated by other sources.
N. real statistics researchers know that this study has numerable crippling flaws and should not be held as gospel by anyone. Even a first year stats student can see it. The reason this story is important is that it may influence governmental policy and it's flawed... That's dangerous.
Parent
Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't really make sense to claim "sample size is small" for an 1,100-person sample. If the sampling was done in a random, unbiased manner, that size sample gives a margin of error of +/- 3%. If there are flaws in the sampling method, that's another thing, but the sample size alone doesn't seem problematic, unless you need accuracy better than +/- 3%.
Parent
Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh I forgot to note this... anyway it addition to other potential flaws TFA says
emphasis mine. They admitted to using file sharing software not pirating goods via said software... The study is effectively making the assumption that filesharing = copyright infringement. Also from TFA:
Even if the study did get the sample size correct the conclusion would still be nearly 30% wrong owing to their false assumption of the number of people with net access. neglecting the distinction between filesharing and copyright infringement TFA estimates that the actual number is between ~30 and ~50% lower than the study claims.
Parent
Re:Story meaning? (Score:4, Insightful)
The study is effectively making the assumption that filesharing = copyright infringement.
I have a very hard time believing that the vast majority of people that use any filesharing application do so exclusivley for legit and non-copyright infringing purposes.
Given the vast quantity of content, I seriously doubt that very many people go through any sort of hassle to determine what is legit and what is not, which results in virtually everyone obtaining material that is copyrighted, regardless whether they know (or care). Given that, I think its a fair guess on their part that yes, most people that claim they are using file-sharing software do so to obtain material illegally.
I just don't understand the stance that most people on this board seem to take regarding this issue. How can everyone be so supportive of what very obviously amounts to theft? It appears to me that somehow people think it is their "right" to obtain copyrighted material for free. I just don't buy for a second that people who claim to only use file-sharing apps for legitimate purposes only actually do so.
If you do indeed use all file-sharing applications for 100% legit purposes, please educate me what you use these services for that makes them so very essential to cause these very emotional posts here.
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Re:Story meaning? (Score:4, Informative)
not everyone does obviously... most reasonable slashdotters advocate for reformed copyright pertly because of the unenforceable nature of longer copyright terms. many such as myself support the concept of a shorter more reasonable copyright term that does what the constitution requires: encourage the advancement of the arts.
most of the anger is directed toward the music/movie industry's response to piracy- weaken/destroy fair use, demonize all p2p [possibly restricting its use in the future out of fear] suing people as a scare tactic, excessive/un-constitutional fines, DRMed media etc...
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Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Insightful)
most of the anger is directed toward the music/movie industry's response to piracy- weaken/destroy fair use, demonize all p2p [possibly restricting its use in the future out of fear] suing people as a scare tactic, excessive/un-constitutional fines, DRMed media etc...
...I don't see why these tactics are unreasonable...
So, just so that you can protect your "copyrighted content" from being stolen by someone other than me, you believe that it is "reasonable" to use bogus or flawed "research" to fool the government into a) taking away my legal rights (fair use); b) criminalizing software that can be and is used for legal purposes (P2P); c) abuse our legal system (suing people as scare tactic/impose excessive/unconstitutional fines); and d) crippling your "copyrighted content" so that I cannot exercise my right of fair use after I have purchased your "copyrighted content" (DRM/refer back to a) )?
It is even more difficult to attach a value to the legitimate uses of file-sharing networks, but if you can point me at examples of how file-sharing systems have a positive economic impact on anyone, please let me know.
Really? So you don't see value in a content provider being able to reduce operating expenses by distributing their content via P2P? Just because you are too lazy to do a simple search using any common search engine doesn't mean such examples [pbworks.com] don't exist. And why exactly does it have to have a positive economic impact on anyone - why does it have to have any economic impact at all? There are many things that have neither a positive economic impact nor any economic impact whatsoever, should those be illegal too?
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Re:Story meaning? (Score:4, Interesting)
because it doesn't work? why are our police resources being used to enforce extended copyright law when it is neither enforceable nor in the public interest to do so?
hence the law is unenforceable- that is to say that it can't be enforced without far more draconian measures that violate other rights.
all it has to do is discourage the advancement of the arts relative to an alternative solution. In that case the copyright system as it is would be unconstitutional in the US.
those tactics are often illegal, rights violating and unconstitutional. suing people for 10,000 x damages is a violation of the 8th amendment. various practices by the RIAA/MPAA are illegal including but not limited to violating the DMCA, abuse of the legal system, fraud and entrapment...
live cds, distribution of software patches, advertising which ADV films uses P2P to distribute advertising clips for their anime media, distribution of creative commons licensed materials etc...
I'm sure that had nothing to do with single tracks being sold on Itunes, the poor state of CDs released today or the recession.
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Re: (Score:3)
Re:Story meaning? (Score:4, Informative)
Basically, except that the confidence level for the interval is 95%, not 50%. Should've quoted that, but 95% is the usual assumed one.
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Re:Story meaning? (Score:4, Informative)
A margin of error of +/- 3% is the Maximum margin of error for a random sample of 1100 drawn from a large enough population at the 95% significance level (actually its really +/-2.95%), i.e this is the margin of error when the observed % is 50% , The margin of error is less when the observed % approaches 0 or 100%.
In the case of an observed % of 11.6 the margin of error is +/-1.9% so it is 95% likely that the population figure is between 9.8% and 13.5%
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Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just as easily as a random sample can accurately reflect a population as a whole, it can equally be skewed to be a completely inaccurate representation of the real world.
If by "just as easily" you mean "with an enormously lower probability", then yes. But then, that's what a statement of margin of error says.
Statistics isn't all that complicated, and what a statistical measure means can be both demonstrated and proven. You don't need to get all faux existential about how "it's all just a bunch of crap, man". You don't know what you're talking about.
Also, entropy? No such thing as random? Really? Don't inject physical phenomena you clearly don't understand in a discussion about pure mathematics.
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Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. the same size is small.. probably too small to make the claims they did.
First statistics lesson I ever had, first thing the professor did was make an estimate based on 10 people about the whole population. He was correct, by the way. He went on to rant that anything that uses large amounts of people (by which he meant more than at most a few dozen) was not proper statistics. If you simply count everybody, it should be called "counting", you see, not statistics.
2. they altered the numbers on an estimate of how many people fileshare on the assumption that the number was under-reported.
And since they are right that the number turned out to be bigger in other studies, slightly. It seems a reasonable adaptation. It's easy to say it's unreasonable, of course. But they are absolutely correct that the number is most likely smaller. So how much should they adjust it ? Like I said, it seems a reasonable adjustment. Not absurdly high, not absurdly low.
3. conflict of interest... it's like the tobacco industry sponsoring studies claiming that smoking doesn't have anything to do with lung cancer... there is significant reason to believe that the study carries significant bias in favor of their conclusion and must at the least be repeated by other sources.
There don't exist studies that have no bias. Either research is funded by companies, or it's funded by government. Both have serious axes to grind, mostly pertaining to political ideology. If business intrest groups would not fund research we'd never have even the semblance of unbiased research that we have.
By the way, who should pay for studies ? Obviously the government has a vested interest in more legislation. The ifpi (us dept) has a vested interest in creating legal instruments to counteract filesharing. And the filesharers have a vested intrest in more "privacy", and legal instruments against ISPs (for the same reason a thief wants privacy, obviously, let's please not start the "what about those who only share openbsd", we all know that's not the filesharers being talked about).
How about we do the sane thing, and let all of them fund studies. Then read them all, and see what we believe to be true.
Just because people are biased, by the way, does not mean the truth can be biased. We are simply limited to imperfect instruments for reading the truth. Truth is absolute, and the number of filesharers is just a single number, not 2, not 5. And yes, we'll probably need a better definition and classification than "filesharers". The effects of filesharing are negative for artists (certainly for pop artists), and especially for the "music industry". There can be little doubt about that. How much damage is done, is anyone's guess. But by criticizing their observations, AND listening to them criticize our observations, we can hope to get closer to the real truth.
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Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Insightful)
And since they are right that the number turned out to be bigger in other studies, slightly. It seems a reasonable adaptation. It's easy to say it's unreasonable, of course. But they are absolutely correct that the number is most likely smaller. So how much should they adjust it ? Like I said, it seems a reasonable adjustment. Not absurdly high, not absurdly low.
Here's where I find a major problem. You do not fudge your data. Period. These other studies may show higher numbers, but do we have proof they weren't fudged as well?
There's too many stories about companies performing pharmecutical trials and then throwing the data away because it didn't present a positive light.
If you're going to adjust numbers, you better have a damn sound reasoning for it rather than "we have a hunch people lied, so..."
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Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they're going to "adjust" the numbers, why did they even bother doing the research at all? Why not just come out and say,"We didn't like what the numbers said, so we threw them away and we're making a WAG with some bullshit we're pulling out of our ass." I understand that they're a research (read "marketing") company, and so are constitutionally incapable of telling the plain truth because they could burst into flames, but it would be a new experience. And fun to watch!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Every politician should undergo a statistics examination as a prerequisite.
Scoundrel Statistics (Score:5, Informative)
This is almost as cliche in arguments of statistics as the car analogy is on slashdot, and it's the sign of a scoundrel. If you actually had a first year stat student's understanding of stats you'd know where the weaknesses actually are, and where all the rest of the smoke blown in this discussion goes laghably wrong.
So let's apply some first year stats to the issue.
First, the sample size. Whether it is numerically large enough to be useful is a matter not only of it's size but also the number of positive results. IOW, a sample size of 1176 is too small if you found 3 of what you're looking for, but if you found 136 (11.6% of 1176), you have plenty of samples. The question is then only whether you had a representative sample.
My next concern would be precision. Using data with three or four significant digits (136, 1176) to make conclusions to seven significant digits (11.56463%) is silly, but that doesn't seem to have happened here. The only number in all of this that is fishy is the 16.3% number. To get three significant digits they'd have to know the number of lying households to that precision. If they had another study that determined this number they might very well have a number to that precision, but I'm assuming they just guessed.
That's still not a problem. If you guess, you run your confidence interval through your formulae (here it's a simple product) to put a range on your results. If it's a from-your-ass guess you might put a 100% failure estimate on your low end (i.e. there might be no lying households at all) to arrive at a conservative range. Here, it looks like they used an estimate of 40%. They should have (and might have; I didn't RTFA) run the un-adjusted 11.6% through the formulae to get a conservative low-end range.
Anyway, the number they finally used was 7%. One significant digit. That doesn't imply the same precision as, say, 6.7% would. In fact, if their figure for the number of lying households really was accurate to one digit (i.e. 35-45%) then rounding their final result to one digit was the correct procedure. If it was just a guess they should have run the absolute low estimate (probably, zero lying households) through to get a range.
So, with actual first year stat knowledge it's possible to actually state what might be wrong with the study, and not resort to "any first year stat student" hand-waving. It's clear that the most-cited criticism (the sample size) is the result of ignorance and group think, not actual knowledge of statistics.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Your criticisms are largely valid, but I still think the sample size was too small. After all, they couldn't know before they did the study what percentage would answer what way ... not unless the study was rigged.
Of course, it also depends on what the purpose is. If it were for marketing, then this might be a quite acceptable procedure. In that case a large amount of error wouldn't cause significant problems to anyone. But if it's being used to lobby for laws, then it's just that it won't cause any pro
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Survey sizes of around 1000 are pretty standard. If you run the survey and get 3 positives out of 1000, you say "Oh shit, sample size is too small", then run the same survey with 5,000 or 10,000 people to catch a larger number people you are targeting - i.e. we're looking to see what percentage of people practice illegal file sharing, we need to find at least a decent number of illegal file sharers so we know our survey is accurate.
It's not a matter of knowing what you'll get before hand or rigging the stu
Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary tries to paint this study bad because it "downsides" the amount of filesharers
I presume by "downsides" you mean "reduces"? Well the summary says "That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.'" So they actually UPPED the number of filesharers. This is objection #1 to "good research":
1. You do a survey to objectively measure the support of your hypothesis
2. The survey of a tiny sample indicates that filesharers are a pretty low percentage
3. You "adjust" this number -- otherwise known as "fudging the data" -- to better reflect your own hypothesis.
The same tactics in any scientific endeavor would get your papers retracted, your funding canceled, some sort of disciplinary action initiated, etc.
The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers? What if they only polled home internet users, but then used the "total number of internet users" -- which includes corporate subscribers -- to come up with their 11mil number? There are other possible, non-numerical issues too. What if the respondents confused downloading from bittorent with downloading from iTunes?
If you want many other examples of "bad science", read Ben Goldacre's blog [badscience.net]
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Re:Story meaning? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's not.
http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html [raosoft.com]
About 60 million people in the UK, sample size of 1,176, confidence interval of 96% gives a margin of error of 2.99%. So, it's 96% likely that they got within 2.99% of the right answer (to the question of how many people admit to it).
I hate seeing this "that's too small a sample size" objection to every single study, from people who clearly don't know enough about how sample sizes work.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice calculator, I think the GP's main point though was that there is no evidence of a properly selected sample. You would be right in saying that the sample size has very little to do with anything compared to whether the sample is biased or not.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, you missed the point of that post.
The point was that the sample size has almost no bearing on the accuracy of the survey provided it is truly representative of the overall population.
If you can get a sample size of 10 that is representative of a population of 60,000,000 people, you'll have a pretty accurate survey. The reality is, that's not possible in most cases. You'll generally have more than 10 demographics of varying percentages of the total population, making 10 simply too small. 1000, however
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers?
You don't seem to understand the way good polling and statistics work. If you already have solid data on the demographic makeup of your population, it does not take a very large sample size at all to get accurate results. A sample size of 1000+ is more than enough to come within 3% accuracy (plus or minus) for any given study provided you already have good demographic information. To be accurate with a small sample size, you do NOT want to choose your survey takers at random, at least not completely. Sp
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it makes a difference. When the lobbyists stand in front of lawmakers, those lawmakers want to know the real size of the problem. If the industry's lobbyists have to say, "We think we are losing almost a million pounds each and every year to piracy", lawmakers are going to be mildly concerned. However, if they lie, and claim that they are losing BILLIONS of pounds, those lawmakers realize that the tax collectors are losing a huge sum of money.
When you want action, you always exaggerate your losses a
Re:Story meaning? (Score:4, Insightful)
To me, the number is meaningless in itself. The fact that government agencies have been using the number is the issue. Either they knew that the number was wrong or they didn't bother checking it. Both possibilities can point to incompetence or malice and reflect very badly on the people responsible.
You might be happy with government by making shit up and gut feelings but for the rest of us this is a good example of why government has no respect.
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What's the confidence interval? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever you estimate a statistic like that, you should also indicate the level of uncertainty surrounding the estimate. Why are they not reporting the upper and lower bounds of the confidence interval surrounding that estimate?
Re:What's the confidence interval? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever you estimate a statistic like that, you should also indicate the level of uncertainty surrounding the estimate. Why are they not reporting the upper and lower bounds of the confidence interval surrounding that estimate?
Perhaps because it's hard to come up with confidence intervals when you admit to fudging your own data by bumping the estimate up by almost five percentage points.
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Wait, you believed them? (Score:4, Informative)
They think that a single copy of a song is worth over a hundred thousand dollars too. They claim to lose more in revenue each month than the GDP of most countries. All because of those dyyyeaaarrrn pirates. Enron looks positively boring in comparison to the accounting techniques the recording industry uses. None of this is news. About the only people that buy this crap are judges and legislators -- the rest of us are almost universally of the mindset that a bag of potato chips has more value than most of the recording industry's portfolio.
Re:Wait, you believed them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, let's look at the maths - supposing each person only shares 24 mp3s. By US standards at least, that's a cost of $1.92 million. So with 7 million file sharers, that's $13.44 trillion.
Now let's check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) [wikipedia.org] - wow, these 7 million people are causing damage to the UK economy equal to almost 5 times the entire GDP of the UK...
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Meaningless admission (Score:5, Insightful)
Using file-sharing software does not equate to sharing files illegally. I admit to using BitTorrent to download Fedora ISO's, and there's nothing illegal about that.
Re:Meaningless admission (Score:5, Funny)
I asked the British government, but unfortunately they told me you don't actually exist. Sorry.
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the story title is kind of lame (Score:5, Informative)
Some of the estimation steps might be sketchy, but the basic practice of estimating a population proportion from a sample of that population is not particularly questionable. That's how almost all studies of populations work, because taking censuses of all people in a country is rarely feasible. We have century-old statistical theory on how to put bounds on the sampling error, too, assuming the sample was indeed random.
You could have a whole slew of these stories if you really objected to that basic methodology, e.g. nearly every estimate of N million people suffering from a disease or disorder is based on a sample.
Re:the story title is kind of lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it ok to change "11.6%" to "16.3%" based on a "hunch"?
I'm not a statistician, this is an honest question
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Re:the story title is kind of lame (Score:4, Insightful)
If there was some previous result that only 2/3 of filesharers admit it when asked, then an upwards revision by 1/3 in an estimate would be defensible. A "hunch" is not quite as good evidence. of course.
I was objecting mainly to the "how 136 people became 7 million" title, which to my ears reads mainly as a criticism of the sample size. But whatever the problems with this estimate, the sample size wasn't really among them.
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Re:the story title is kind of lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it ok to change "11.6%" to "16.3%" based on a "hunch"? I'm not a statistician, this is an honest question
IAAS, and the answer is no. That goes for the GP as well -- no one is contesting estimation theory, just that the fundamental assumptions are so grossly unmet in this "study" as to render it meaningless. And as someone else already commented, it's dangerous here because it's going to dictate public policy.
If you're going to "adjust" your objective findings, based on some bizarre assumption that a certain percentage of people will lie about file sharing, then why do a survey at all if not to create mathematical/sciency-sounding smoke and mirrors?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not but you need some basis if you are going to make such an adjustment. There are ways to determine the rate of sampling error for instance and then use that. In this case that might be to much effort or get you into legally murky waters so what an honest researcher would write something like this:
In my sample of XXXX, YY responded that they sometimes used p2p software in an illegal fashion. Based on this the number of extra legal file sharers in the total population would be ZZZZZZ. I would not expect
mathematics (Score:5, Funny)
file sharing software=pirate??? (Score:3, Insightful)
using file sharing software does not mean you pirate software or media.....
So, optimistically, 2.12 million, then? (Score:3, Interesting)
136 out of 1176 people in households with internet connections admitted to having used file-sharing software (source: the summary)
18.3 million households in the UK had internet access at time of polling in 2009 (source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=8 [statistics.gov.uk] )
136/1176 * 18.3M ~= 2.12M
Not sure if "having used file-sharing software" means that they downloaded / distributed at least 1 item - say, a song - via said software and that they had no actual rights to do so (you know, as most people use file-sharing software to distribute Linux distros, or have simply 'used it' but didn't actually download or upload anything... *cough*)...
But let's presume it does.
Then let's take the low price in iTunes UK of GBP 0.79 per song, then the music industry 'lost' ('cos obviously people had no intention of buying that song that they didn't download / distribute because they were downloading a Linux distro instead *cough*) about GBP 1,671,897.96.
Well, that's peanuts, innit.
Why the BBC rocks (Score:5, Insightful)
This is yet another example as to why the BBC is the finest broadcasting and journalistic organisation on the planet (I've never worked for them, sold to them or have any other financial connection other than the license fee).
They actually investigated something created by an industry group and found it to be bollocks and then reported it. The BBC are arguably the most "socialist" organisation in the democratic world (funded by a tax on everyone for the benefit of everyone) and yet they still question and challenge everything.
The US seriously needs something that questions vested interests and rubbish statistics as much as the BBC. Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are just comedians and FoxNews is just comedy.
Given a choice between the first amendment and the BBC, I'll take the BBC; its demonstrated more freedom of speech in a week than the US media has in a decade.
Re:Why the BBC rocks (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh come on, the BBC have reported this number many times since it was first used and you sing their praises because Radio 4 happens to do a show devoted to statistics? I wonder just how much time they will devote to debunking this statistic considering how many times they have quoted it.
Just because the BBC is better than the US networks doesn't mean we should be proud, personally I'm appalled at how low the bar is set.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can also avoid paying the licence fee if your TV can't receive over-the-air pictures, e.g. if it is disconnected from the aerial.
There was once a "radio licence", you can still see a reference to it in one episode of Monty Python, but this was phased out when almost nobody owned a radio but not a TV.
In the future, I expect the TV licence will be extended to include Internet connections as well, since those can now be used to receive BBC programmes too. At that point, we will see if the BBC can continue
Re:Why the BBC rocks (Score:4, Informative)
You only need one license, you can have as many tellies as you like. Portable tellies used in caravans and the like will be covered by the license for your home as well.
If you have two houses, you will need two licenses though, afaicr - which is why students away at Uni need to buy a license - including if they're in halls - even though their permanent residence might still be their parent's house.
I find the BBC great value and love it dearly. I suspect people will say that's because I'm white, middle class and liberal or something.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If it's bogus, it's probably too low. (Score:5, Interesting)
> Work backwards from the undisputed declining sales figures of the recording industry.
The main reason for declining sales is the fact that CD sales during the 90s were artificially boosted by people replacing records and tapes with CDs... then replacing them again when remastered CDs were released a few years later. It was a once-in-a-lifetime event for the recording industry that won't be repeated during our lifetimes.
People re-bought CDs they already owned in analog (or optimized-for-analog CDs) because they represented an epic improvement in quality by just about any meaningful standard over the analog media they replaced. Everything that's come out since CDs has only been cheaper, shittier-sounding, or intolerably-crippled by DRM.
Here's an idea for the music industry: ditch the DRM'ed formats, and roll out a music format on DVD media with 96KHz 32-bit stereo PCM. Make the discs gold-colored, call it something like "X-fi", and sell them for $24.95. You'll win on all counts -- genX'ers will go back into highschool mode and buy them to show off how rich they are and/or pretend they sound sufficiently better than 16-bit CDs to justify spending ~twice as much on them, and the fact that every disc will be ~4-8 gigabytes will serve as self-limiting DRM for the next decade or so. Just make sure they still have the MOST compelling consumer benefit intact (and reason why people who buy CDs still DO buy CDs): it's a flawless first-generation master to use for making all your "working" copies for everywhere else.
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Re:It's probably still accurate though. (Score:4, Interesting)
When you know the total population of the UK is roughly 30 million households, that's a fair chunk of the population. (total population is roughly 60 million people)
Out of the total population, only 18.7 million have broadband [statistics.gov.uk]. Guess roughly 40% of the population is a pirate then. We should make it legal, government being there for the populace and all that.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As a solipsist I'd say everyone does it.