Colleges, Counting Downloads and MPAA's PR Train Wreck
Really big disasters leave you wondering where to begin. The same goes for the Motion Picture Association of America's disclosure about it's mistakes in saying college campuses account for close to half of moving industry losses in the U.S. to peer-to-peer file sharing. We could start with the restatement that says the original estimate was off by a factor of 3, or with colleges saying "I told you so" we aren't that big of a problem, or with some of the reactions from the public that seem to have less to do with the facts of the case and more about picking sides and defending your team.
As for the basics, the New York Times says:
For more than two years, the association has drawn attention to a statistic that one blogger today termed “a big old lie” — that college students were responsible for 44 percent of the movie industry’s claimed domestic losses, because of prodigious illegal downloading.
It now looks, if we are have confidence in the latest report, tha the number is more like 15%. Inside Higher Ed points out:
It now appears that the figure was closer to 15 percent, or $243 million. Mark Luker, a vice president at Educause, an organization promoting technology use in higher education, said the numbers reflected college students both on and off campus even though college Internet service providers, the target of pressure from both Congress and the MPAA to step up anti-piracy efforts, typically only serve on-campus residents.
If we look at on-campus students only, the measure is closer to 3% according to the Inside Higher Ed article. So, it looks like 97% of the losses are due to non-campus downloads. No wonder colleges are pissed to be singled out.
I've often argued in this blog that we need good data to make informed decisions about security problems. Here's an example where bad data will skew decisions in the wrong direction. If MPAA and Congress want to stem losses, shouldn't they address the biggest parts of the problem first which seem to be consumer, broadband users?
One last note on this, I don't care for MPAA's tactics and I don't care to argue for P2P illegal downloads. I especially don't think much of using this incident to grind ideological axes like occurred on the NYT article with comments like this from "A True Conservative":
Once again, liberals on the wrong side of the law are looking for an apology from those on the right side of the law.
or this retort from "A True Liberal":
Once again, a conservative makes the erroneous assumption that anyone doing something wrong must be a liberal. Interesting that this is yet another case of a conservative pushing for even more government intrusion! Telling lies about liberals seems to be a primary way that conservatives try to hide their push for a bigger government.
Can't we just stick to the facts? That is, assuming we can do the math correctly.
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