overview

This profile looks at surveys and projections about the extent and impact of downloading content from sites maintained by publishers/broadcasters or through filesharing services such as Napster and Gnutella. It includes some figures about offline copying.

The following pages supplement discussion in the Intellectual Property, Electronic Publishing, Net Metrics & Statistics and Security & Info Crime guides on this site. Those guides encompass issues and developments such as fair use, jurisdictional challenges, the US No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, e-books, web demographics, cyberpiracy and ECMS.

The profile is under construction: we'll be adding more information shortly.

     contents of this profile

The following pages cover -

music - a selection of prominent surveys, credible or otherwise, about the number of people accessing music online and perceptions about copying

software - figures on the computer software [under development]

books - and on electronic texts [under development]

video - and film, sports broadcasts and other moving image content [under development]

     populations, projections and propaganda

The Net Metrics & Statistics guide on this site features a page that highlights resources about demographic number crunching and the hallowed art of massaging statistics.

Several of the reports identified in this profile have been sponsored and published by vested interests. Reports from different interests, ostensibly both concerned with the same population, can claim widely different results. As noted in the 2000 Cracking Down on Copycats: Enforcement of Copyright in Australia report from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal & Constitutional Affairs there is disagreement about basic terminology. Many reports are replete with statistics but offer little indication about

• how the survey population was chosen (is it truly representative of the overall population, online and otherwise? was it self-selected?)
• the shape of questions (were they leading? were they validated? did they differentiate between licit and illicit activity?)
• intention versus actual practice
• recurrent versus one-off activity

Several surveys have accordingly been criticised for conflating illicit downloading of music, software or other content and legitimate downloading (whether for free or with payment). Others feature highly problematical projections, with for example figures for revenue lost through piracy that assume all countries use US law and have the same market structure as the US or EU. Others, in particular those under the auspices of some online magazine/news sites, rely on a small and wholly self-selected population with no precautions against multiple votes.

Unfortunately there is little publicly-accessible independent research, particularly outside North America.

We've suggested that there are considerable uncertainties about the shape and size of the online population in Australia and elsewhere: basic numbers, age/education and other demographics, time spent online each week and so forth. Major metrics consultancies report considerably different figures about online destinations and the interpretation of data.

Identification of opinions and many actions is even more of an inexact science. At their worst, publishers produce reports showing community respect for creators or, when calling for tougher sanctions, demonstrate gross disrespect by consumers. US/EU hardware manufacturers (and Asian polls in general) traditionally report low community support for protecting intangibles but strong support for protecting hardware. Reports from some cyberlibertarians show that copyright is either conceptually nonsensical or administratively unenforceable. Policymakers draw the conclusion du jour. And attitudes change as the online population normalises and thus more closely reflects perceptions/values in the polulation at large.




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