Den britiske musikindustri har bekendtgjort, at den britiske befolkning hvert år downloader 4,73 milliarder ophavsretsligt beskyttede kunstværker til en værdi af 120 milliarder pund.
Før vi lige spørger os selv, om alle disse ting virkelig er £25 værd stykket, var det måske også værd at kigge lidt på de andre tal.
Det gjorde Bad Science:
You are killing our creative industries. “Downloading costs billions” said the Sun. “MORE than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material.”
That’s about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily Mail were worried too: “The network had 1.3 million users sharing files online at midday on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one file per day, this would amount to 4.73 billion items being consumed for free every year.”
Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy more music. I’d like more details.
But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73 billion items downloaded each year, worth £120 billion. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. Now before we go anywhere, this already seems rather high. I am not an economist, and I don’t know about their methods, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value. And someone downloading a £1,000 professional 3D animation software package to fiddle about with at home may not use it more than three times. I’m just saying.
In any case, that’s £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that’s still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax. Oh but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473 million items and £12 billion (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist. I can find no public correction.
I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of ten and were widely reported in news outlets around the world. SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful.
In the “believe it or not” dept.
Det har vel altid været sådan, at en mere effektiv produktionsform erstatter de mindre effektive, ihvertfald efter kapitalismens gennembrud. Den mest effektive måde at sprede information på idag, er distribution via internet og kopiering derfra. Det er ikke skadeligt for samfundsøkonomien, tværtimod!
Det eneste reelle problem der er ved det, er spørgsmålet om betaling til ophavsmanden, f.eks. musikere. Det problem skal selvfølgelig løses på en eller anden måde.
Når de store produktionsselskaber stritter så meget imod udviklingen, så er det ikke af hensyn til kulturen, men fordi de har en masse kapital bundet i et FORÆLDET produktionsapparat.
Jeg har ikke selv gjort det så meget i piratkopiering. Men for mange år siden købte jeg en piratkopi af et avanceret (og ellers meget dyrt) program til en Amiga. Jeg fandt ud af, at jeg slet ikke rigtig kunne bruge programmet, og smed disketterne til side. Så hvem har jeg egentlig snydt? (svarer det ikke snarere til at prøve et par bukser i en tøjforretning, og bestemme sig til ikke at købe dem?). Om jeg har slettet disketterne eller ej, kan vel også være ligegyldigt, så længe de ligger i mit pulterkammer sammen med museumsgenstanden (Amigaen).
Altid rart og vel også befriende, når der findes “tværpolitiske” emner hvor man kan være rørende enig med en fra den anden politiske blok.
@Jesper: Ja, ikke! Fri software er et andet område, hvor Richard Stallman og Eric Raymond kan siges at repræsentere “fløjene”, den ene nærmest libertær socialdemokrat og den anden højrelibertarianer og vistnok gun-freak …