p2pnet.net News:- Yesterday, we pointed out that OTX, the company which compiled the MPAA’s shock-horror file-share movie-download study has a number of interesting people working for it: ie, they’d held top level entertainment industry jobs.

The ’study’ said almost one in four file sharers have illegally downloaded a film. Predictably, the mainstream media went for it, producing headlines such as Movie piracy on Internet called an epidemic.

Given the presence of ex-industry execs in the higher echelons of OTX and its owner, ZelnickMedia, was it remotely possible that the ‘independent’ report was somehow produced with maybe just a teeny weeny bit of help from the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America)?

Nah. Couldn’t be.

The Register’s Ashlee Vance, however, has a nasty, suspicious mind and asked OTX’s Wendy Goldberg if the MPAA had sponsored the study.

“No. OTX is an independent organization,” was the response.

“We didn’t do is specifically for the MPAA, but more as a service to the industry. We know they consider (downloading) a problem.”

That’s OK then. But there were a few other minor problems as well.

“For one, the sample ‘was augmented in several countries in order to provide a minimum sample of 100 movie downloaders per country’,” says Vance, going on:

“Given their total of 3,600 respondents for 8 countries, that breaks down to about 450 respondents per country. And, if you demand that 100 of these be movie downloaders, your numbers start approaching “one in four” pretty quick.

“Secondly, OTX did not even ask what types of movies had been downloaded, and could not say if these were whole movies. Spokeswoman Wendy Goldberg told The Register that the phrase ‘feature film’ was used in some questions but would not give us the exact questions or list questions that did not use this phrase. Did OTX ask if the movies were porn or if users downloaded clips as opposed to the whole move? We’ll never know.”

Yankee Group’s Mike Goodman says the MPAA was using incomplete reporting to “paint a picture that is far from reality”.

An MPAA statement that 17% of downloaders go to movies less frequently falls in line with Yankee’s figure of 16%, but, “the MPAA failed to reveal similar Yankee findings that three times as many downloaders reported increased movie attendance,” Goodman says in TechNewsWorld, going on that 43% of movie downloaders reported going to the movies the same amount, while 41% said they were going more.

Did OTX ask how many downloaders attend more movies? - asked The Register’s Vance. “No, we didn’t ask that,” Goldberg said.

“Goldberg did, however, say that another study showed people were less likely to download a movie after seeing a MPAA sponsored commercial showing how evil the practice is. Did this commercial picture people being electrocuted if they downloaded a movie? ‘No, it didn’t,” she said.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 13th, 2004 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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