[Infowarrior] - UK Government spun 136 people into 7m illegal file sharers

[Richard Forno]

How UK Government spun 136 people into 7m illegal file sharers


http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/351331/how-uk-government-spun-136-people-into-7m-illegal-file-sharers
Posted on 4 Sep 2009 at 14:54

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 BBC has revealed.

The Radio 4 show More or Less - which is devoted to the "often abused  
but ever ubiquitous world of numbers" - decided to examine the  
Government's claim that 7m people in Britain are engaged in illegal  
file sharing.

The 7m figure comes from the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual  
Property, a Government advisory body.

As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan  
sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found  
that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions

The Advisory Board claimed it commissioned the research from a team of  
academics at University College London, who it transpires got the 7m  
figure from a paper published by Forrester Research.

The More or Less team hunted down the relevant Forrester paper, but  
could find no mention of the 7m figure, so they contacted the report's  
author Mark Mulligan.

Mulligan claimed the figure actually came from a report he wrote about  
music industry losses for Forrester subsidiary Jupiter Research. That  
report was privately commissioned by none other than the music trade  
body, the BPI.

Fudged figures

As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan  
sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found  
that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions.

The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of  
6.7m. That 6.7m was 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.

It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing  
was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer  
people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The report's author  
told the BBC that the adjustment "wasn't just pulled out of thin air"  
but based on unspecified evidence.

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.

If the BPI-commissioned Jupiter research had used the Government's  
online population figures, the total number of file sharers would be  
5.6m. If the researchers hadn't adjusted their figures upwards, the  
total number of file sharers would be only 3.9m - or just over half  
the figure being bandied about by the Government.