p2pnet - rss feed: Scamming the media
p2pnet.net News:- The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) are full of equine excreta.
You know that and we know that. But The Word is slowly circulating.
The RIAA employs teams of Statistic Dreamers who rely on the phases of the moon to develop their reports.
And remember the MPAA / OTX ‘research’ finding that said almost a quarter of Net users have illegally downloaded a film - and generated instant Internet Piracy Horror headlines around the world? The AlwaysOn Network has picked it up.with You’ve heard of “junk science?” Then you shouldn’t be surprised to hear about junk research.
“Clever PR folks and canny industry players know perfectly well that a lot of information on the net is misconstrued,” writes Rich Luhr here.
“You can imagine a few of them thinking, ‘Why not be sure that some of it is ‘misconstrued’ in my favor?’ This game is of course much older than the internet, but the internet gives it a greater level of distribution. So occasionally good research gets spun into marginal research, and bad research gets much more play than it deserves.”
Luhr mentions the Online Testing Exchange (OTX) MPAA survey as an example. He doesn’t exactly say it’s full of crap, but you get the message and, ” the MPAA got what it wanted: a lot of press, and at least a few people convinced that ‘billions of dollars’ are being lost to the supposed 25% of us who are movie-downloading ‘pirates’.”
See-through surveys
Entertainment industry companies that commission surveys are well aware that although at the end of the day the studies have no real value, they’ll get picked up by the mainstream print and electronic media outlets, many of which depend absolutely on the entertainment industry for their daily bread and butter.
The CRIA, Canada’s version of the RIAA, was seriously embarrassed, recently, when it failed to convince a Canadian federal court that online file sharing is illegal and is “devastating” the multi-billion dollar music industry.
Under damage control, it claimed, “a significant majority of Canadians disagreed with the recent Federal Court decision which suggested that it is not illegal to upload music files on the Internet,” basing its statement on a poll it commissioned from POLLARA, a firm it favours. [Our emphasis.]
However, when Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled against the CRIA, he didn’t ’suggest’ anything. He stated, clearly and unequivocally, that putting digital music files into a computer directory which might be shared remotely by someone else isn’t copyright infringement under Canadian law.
There are also the various see-through Harris research findings pumped out by the BSA (Business Software Alliance).
“The gap in behaviors and ethical attitudes from the tween to teen years indicates a critical need to educate younger kids even earlier and provide them with guidance that will positively influence their growth as good cyber citizens and their respect for digital copyrighted works,” says Diane Smiroldo, BSA vp of public affairs, after one Harris report in May.
In August, the BSA gave birth to a “copyright-crusading ferret” of which Smiroldo says, “We hope that naming the ferret and creating a comic book curriculum that focuses on respecting digital copyrighted works will be a fun way to remind kids and educators about the importance of learning and practicing good cyber ethics.”
The BSA preaching about ‘good cyber ethics’ rings more than a little hollow.
Just the facts …
America’s Pew Internet & American Life Project said the number of people who share music through the p2p networks had actually increased from an estimated 18 million to 23 million since a November-December, 2003, survey.
And a different Pew report states:
“In terms of their careers, more artists say free music downloading online has helped them than hurt them. Fully 83% of those in the survey say they provide free samples or previews of their music online. And strong pluralities say free downloading has a payoff for them. For instance, 35% of them say free downloading has helped their careers and only 5% say it has hurt. Some 30% say free downloading has helped increase attendance at their concerts, 21% say it has helped them sell CDs or other merchandise; and 19% say it has helped them gain radio playing time for their music. Only fractions of them cite any negative impact of downloading on those aspects of their work.”
“Our focus is on the world’s most popular ‘download’ communities, file sharing networks,” says Eric Garland’s Big Champage on its web page. “These are the download ’sites’ (actually networks) first made famous by Napster and now including clients like Limewire, Bearshare, KaZaA, Morpheus, and hundreds of others.”
And while the music industry is reporting that its sue ‘em all campaign is dramatically reducing the number of file sharers, Big Champagne is reporting that at a conservative estimate, upwards of eight and a quarter million people are online at any given moment, happily swapping around one and a quarter billion files every month, at the very least.
“We’re often told by pros from all sides of the music industry that we deliver a lot of bad news,” says Garland. “But we take it as a compliment because that means we’re telling the whole story.”
Wayne Rosso, Blubster’s former ceo, and the man who used to run Grokster, makes no secret of it. “I always look to Big Champagne’s figures,” he says, “as do significant numbers of the people on the other side of the fence.”
So, how reliable are the various report and surveys, especially if their focus is online file sharing?
Whether they appear to be for or against a particular issue, if there’s an apparent slant in a given direction, it’s almost certainly down to the media reporting it, says Garland, guaranteeing there’s no bias on the part of the researchers and collators who put the reports together.
Given the huge number of people sharing files, the odds of being sued by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) are along the lines of being struck by lightning, as Canadian researcher Markus Geisler makes clear in his study, Theory of Collective Consumer Risk
But Big Music has succeeded admirably in creating an aura of distinct terror around uploading, downloading and sharing digital music files.
And it’s this which means you can’t believe surveys or reports centering on the way music is distributed online unless they’re based on straight data analysis derived from data taken directly from a physical source.
Surveyors investigating alcohol abuse, say, or ‘recreational’ drugs, expect the people they’re surveying to be, well, less than forthright.
Now, add p2p file swapping to the list of dodgy subjects.
“It’s very difficult to get reliable information on topics like music file sharing,” Garland told p2pnet. “And it’s particularly challenging in a climate of aggressive litigation, proposed legislation and what the RIAA calls ‘education’.
“It’s difficult to extract good data from respondents on these things.”
Every time we turn on the TV or open a newspaper, we’re reading about ISPs being compelled to identify their clients in connection with copyright infringement prosecutions and, “It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to think: ‘Here I am in my home and these researchers have called me on my home phone, so they know who I am and where I live’,” Garland says.
“And even assuming researchers’ best efforts to maintain my privacy, and given that they have no interest in identifying me, nonetheless, I may well imagine they could be compelled - just like an ISP - to identify me in conjunction with a civil litigation or, real horror of horrors, a criminal one.”
Climate of Terror
The recording industry has worked hard to create this climate of terror and it’s their explicit agenda to want people to be disuaded from sharing files out of fear of the consequences that will result if they’re discovered.
“But respondents are in no danger from researchers,” says Garland.
“The critical difference between an ISP and a market research firm is: we researchers take great care to make sure we’re not in possession of anything that could identify someone. So when a market researcher calls you when you’re in the middle of dinner, that typically is the result of random digit dialling which actually ensures that although this company has phoned you at home, they’re not actually in possession of your home number, or of other identifying marks.”
However, even given that someone answering questions for a market researchers isn’t afraid of suddenly ending up on the RIAA’s sue ‘em all list, most people will still be less than truthful in their responses, says Garland.
And that’s because in addition to creating the climate of fear, the music industry has also given file sharing an aspect of being somehow unwholesome - of being tainted.
Predictable Media Response
“It’s not unlike getting someone to disclose information about behaviours that are considered offensive, or about drug or recreational drug abuse,” he states. “People are uncomfortable discussing these kinds of things and they’re just as uncomfortable talking about file sharing with a stranger.”
There’s no such thing as bad PR for file sharing, and the music industry knows this, Garland adds.
But against that, he also points out that every time it comes up, it simply introduces the concept to more and more casual users.
In the meanwhile, the surveys are “of tremendous importance to the handful of people who can really be unduly influenced by the information in the surveys - I’m talking about legislators and executives in the industry.”
Nonetheless everyone - legislators included - should, “employ a healthy dose of skepticism to any reporting of any kind - the media included. Satisfy yourself with the methodology and the agenda of whoever’s reporting the information,” says Garland.
Be all of the above as it may, given that respondents (for file sharing, at least) seem to be so unreliable, what’s the point of doing a survey in the first place?
Could it be the studies’ true purpose is to generate very predictable media responses?
