£12bn cost of one file sharing server. Mmmm…..

Friday’s Guardian reported that a study conducted by researchers at University College London for the ‘Strategic Board for Intellectual Property Policy‘ had found a cost to the British economy of illegal file downloading as £12bn. Going to the UCL report, the following appears to be the source of this claim:

“Just to make it clear – this is not simply an issue of music and film downloads alone. Software losses due to what is often described as “piracy” were, for example, $48 billion worldwide in 2007 (BSA, 2007); and in the UK the figure was $1,837,000 or approximately £1.25 billion. An exploratory CIBER investigation found vast quantities of films, music, software, e-books, games and television content available to download and share without cost. On one peer-to-peer network we found that at midday on a weekday5 there were 1.3 million users, sharing content. If each “peer” from this network (not the largest) downloaded one file per day the resulting number of downloads (music, film, television, e-books, software and games were all available) would be 473 million items per year. If the figure for each individual is closer to five or more items per day, the lowest estimate of downloaded material (remembering that the entire season of the Fox television series “24”, or the “complete” works of the rock group Led Zeppelin can be one file) is just under 2.4 billion files. And if the average value of each file is £5 – that is a rough low average of the price of a DVD or CD, rather than the higher prices of software or E-books – we have the online members of one file sharing network consuming approximately £12 billion in content annually – for free. These figures are staggering.” p. 6

This reasoning puzzles me. for several reasons.

Firstly, do we really think that around 2% of the entire UK population were active on this one file sharing service at one time or even on one day? This seems very high, particularly when, according to the report, the service in question is not even the largest. More likely, I suspect, this is a world-wide figure so attributions of the impact on the British economy can’t really be inferred from what we’re told here. Also, it is my (admittedly limited) understanding of how filesharing works that ‘logged on’ probably includes people who are making files available to be shared, rather than actively ‘consuming’ (which is the implication in the paragraph above).

Secondly, the authors claim that an ‘entire series of 24 or the works of Led Zeppelin’ can be downloaded as a single file. It certainly is possible that this is the case, though I suspect probably not the norm. A quick look at a DVD from the Lord of the Rings shows it contains 22 files on one DVD (there are two DVDs in the box).

Thirdly, I suspect that most filesharing is music. Here, the price of a file is likely to be rather closer to the 79p/song charged by iTunes.

Fourthly, to be seen a ‘cost’ to either the intellectual property holders in any real sense, downloading a file has actually to be ‘consumed’ (watched/listened to). Working on the assumptions in the UCL’s report, 473 million items (which they seem to equate to perhaps an hour of ‘consumption’ on a DVD or CD) this would require that filesharers watch/listen to about 80 mins of new content every day. Possible, though it does seem on the high side (given that this is just one service, which the UCL claim accounts for around 2% of the UK population).

So,  lets assume (more accurately, guess) that half of those connected are British (arbritrary, it’s true but in UCL style I think on the high side). Further, let’s assume (guess) that my arbritrary DVD has twice the number of files than is normal, that would reduce the cost/DVD to 50p (which is  the same order of magnitude as the 79p we might use as a figure for all of the music content. These two, equally plausible guesses, combined would reduce the £12bn figure to £600m.

Now, of course it may be that the UCL haven’t made available here all of the information that they have access to, though a quick skim of the ‘methods’ section of the report doesn’t suggest that any of the methods they report would have yielded this sort of information.

Two issues follow from this:

- The figures which will be landing on policymakers’ desks will be deeply unreliable, but will be used to support policies such as making internet service providers responsible for policing copyright infringements of their customers.

- If it’s an indication of what happens when academic bodies become more closely concerned to respond to the needs of industry (as we’re constantly being told we need to), then standards of academic research will fall in response to what the customer wants.

I’m no specialist in this area, but if I were writing about it, I would want at least to report (if only to refute) findings such as Oberholzer & Strump’s (2004)’s that the impact of illegal downloading on music sales was ‘indistinguishable from zero’.

Digital Britain in Yorkshire

Yesterday evening I went to an event organised by Yorkshire Forward billed as a consultation on Carter’s Digital Britain report (according to Sam Sharps, who has been working with Carter on the report, they are still open to ideas despite the end of the formal consultation period on March 12th, but he may just have been being polite to his hosts).  Two points struck me.

The good news: the Digital Region proposal for a high-speed (25mbps) network in south Yorkshire has been approved, and while it won’t do it on its own, it may be a precursor to regeneration of the area, some of which has still not really recovered from the closure of the pits.

The bad news. YF organised their own presentation around the structure of Carter’s interim report. They talked about the digital infrastructure (the Digital Region and other work they’ve been doing) and their support for digital content (the term is a useful one to engineers, but when used by politiciams always seems to obscure the important discussions). They had nothing, literally, to say about ‘access and fairness’ (to use their own term in the powerpoint) or about skills/education.

SuperMayor visits Skinningrove, and other stories

Yet more of Steve Thompson’s escapades in Second Life, this time on YouTube:

and related videos – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGnb_8isy1E

Donating online – limits of usability?

This week, Jacob Neilsen’s ‘Alertbox’ “Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities” summarises some research of his company’s looking at the usability of online donations (thanks to John Naughton for the link). The article highlights difficulties that his test users had in deciding which organisations to donate money to. The article may be useful in helping to understand better how to optimise a web site to donating, but I think it’s wise to treat this with a little caution.

Firstly, it would be interesting to know how realistic a user task this is. While I’ve donated money online, it’s never been as a result of thinking ‘I want to donate a tenner; now who should I give it to?’. The decision making process is rather more complicated than that, and is typically made well before I get to the web site. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the aims and objectives of an organisation in making such a decision. Am I typical? I don’t know, but I doubt I’m that atypical among online donors.

Secondly, and more widely, this type of usability report says little about ‘what’ such a website should be doing in the first place. As part of the Practical Design for Social Action project, we conducted several case studies of how not-for-profit organisations designed technologies (primarily web sites). In one case, a large medical support charity consulted its users about their preferences and desires from an online web site/community. Here, new users were often people recently diagnosed with serious illness and their friends and families. It emerged from the consultation that requesting donations from such new users was not felt by them to be terribly appropriate. In the redesign of the site, requests for donations were reduced in prominence, and the support functions of the web site increased. Of course, this may lead to a reduction in income, at least in the short term, though it seems plausible that engaging more users in the online community may well increase future donations. Either way, users gave feedback that the charity acted upon, changing the priorities of the web site.

The unspoken assumption in Neilsen’s article appears to be that the primary purpose of a web site must be to generate donations. Neilsen goes on to argue that “the worst user experience erosion in this study was caused by heinous integration of local chapters with the higher-level organization”. Now, of course, this (that is, the reported erosion of the user donation experience in a controlled test) may well be true, but also there may be strong reasons for an organisation to want to ‘integrate heinously’ that are unrelated to income generation. It may be about providing a service, mobilising support or encouraging participation, for example.

Findings like Neilsen’s clearly have value, but might be rather more useful if they acknowledged their own context and assumptions rather more clearly.

A man of many talents crosses swords with MySpace

Another Steve Thompson story. Steve is clearly a man of many talents – I knew he had written songs and been involved in the pop scene, but not that Sheena Easton, Elkie Brookes and Celine Dion had performed his work. This has led to his most recent online episode; this time an IP episode with MySpace – see http://tinyurl.com/co25kv.

Clause 152 removed

I have yet to hear from my MP (see earlier post) but it evidently worked…
According to the Register, the government has announced that the clause has been dropped from the Coroners and Justice Bill. See:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/18/data_sharing_drop/