The BBC reports on how the UK government turned a single survey in which 136 people indicated they file shared to claim that there are seven million file sharers in the country. Similar exaggerations occured in Canada earlier this year when the Conference Board of Canada relied on a 2006 Pollara survey that extrapolated data from 1,200 people to claim that there are 1.3 billion unauthorized downloads in Canada each year.
How UK Government Spun 136 People Into 7 Million Illegal File Sharers
2 Comments
Recent Posts
Reversing the Reversal?: Government Puts Privacy Invasive Lawful Access Back on the Agenda 
Canadian Government Introduces New Stablecoin Act as Part of Budget Implementation Legislation 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 250: Wikimedia’s Jan Gerlach on the Risks and Challenges with Digital Policy Reform 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 249: The Debate Over Canada’s AI Strategy – My Consultation Submission and Appearance at the Canadian Heritage Committee 
How the Liberal and Conservative Parties Have Quietly Colluded to Undermine the Privacy Rights of Canadians
And the 136 didn’t even say they were illegally sharing
They presumably included people like myself downloading Solaris and Linux, with the express consent of the owners!
–dave
So what is a more honest figure?
11.6% of households was inflated to 16.3%, pretty much because the researchers felt like it. Next 6.7 million was rounded up. The article doesn’t elaborate on the accuracy of a 1176 sample size survey, maybe a real statistician can elaborate? Would that be within 10% 19 times out of 20 or what?
Obviously the original study didn’t provide a big enough figure (3.9m) so they simply inflated it to match their expectations.