MPAA gets its sums wrong

Author: Gareth Halfacree
Published: 24th January 2008
Comments (7) Stumble
The MPAA should probably invest some of the money that isn't lost to piracy in a calculator.

The MPAA should probably invest some of the money that isn't lost to piracy in a calculator.

The Motion Picture Association of America released a statement yesterday admitting to getting its sums wrong in a 2005 survey often used to browbeat American universities into policing file sharing on campus networks. The inaccurate figures have also been used by the group to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives in the hope of making it illegal for universities to allow file sharing via their networks.

In the original report the MPAA claimed that 44% of the film industry's losses were purely due to file sharing by students attending universities and colleges around the US. The group has now admitted that “human error” caused a slight elevation in that figure.

By slight, they mean huge.

The corrected figures released yesterday now claim that students sharing copyrighted material are responsible for just 15% of the industry's domestic losses. That's almost three times less than originally claimed. Whoops.

The statement released by the MPAA says the group has “taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report” and claims that it hasn't found any other glaring mistakes in the report, but that it will be getting a third party to run through the figures to make sure. Hopefully they'll pick someone who can add up this time.

Any US students feel like writing a letter of complaint to the MPAA for being unfairly accused of single-handedly destroying the US movie industry? Let us know via the forums.
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Quote rhuitron 24th January 2008, 08:40
Opppps my ass!

That was just a shock jock moment.
Just to make the world believe they really are useful and save all the Picture associations millions.
and that they should continue their useless crusade and bust peoples doors down.

I hate them.
Quote mmorgue 24th January 2008, 08:43
Hmm. The original research report claimed that the MPAA lost $6.1 billion per year due to piracey over the webbernet.

So if the original percentage of 44% for illegal downloads was incorrect, how are the MPAA going to support their $6.1 billion loss figure? Or was that a relational figure?

I really do want to see how they work the spin on this..
Quote cyrilthefish 24th January 2008, 09:19
And they're *STILL* using the old 1 download = 1 lost sale argument

which is just blatantly wrong, i can guarantee that somehow they suddenly found some way to completely block *all* downloads, sales would only increase by a small fraction of the download numbers...
Quote DXR_13KE 24th January 2008, 10:51
Quote:
Originally Posted by cyrilthefish
And they're *STILL* using the old 1 download = 1 lost sale argument

which is just blatantly wrong, i can guarantee that somehow they suddenly found some way to completely block *all* downloads, sales would only increase by a small fraction of the download numbers...

during some time and then plummet like a rock attracted by a black hole that lies in a abyss somewhere........

there must be some kind of law you Americans can use to screw them.... they lied about the values.... and if they cant add how do they think they can defend the industry from clie..... pirates?
Quote bahgger 24th January 2008, 11:25
Man, if they were in the business of engineering components in any system, this kind of error could mean a plane dropping out of the sky, a train careening off a track, or a PC crashing when you run Crysis ;(
Quote DXR_13KE 24th January 2008, 13:28
Quote:
Originally Posted by bahgger
Man, if they were in the business of engineering components in any system, this kind of error could mean a plane dropping out of the sky, a train careening off a track, or a PC crashing when you run Crysis ;(

with a mistake like that your airplane could crash simply because they designed the tooth picks......
Quote Vash-HT 24th January 2008, 16:14
I agree with other people, ""human error" probably actually means intentionally inflated for personal profit. The way they usually figure out these losses seem flawed in the first place. Most companies seem to assume that every person who downloaded it for free would have bought it if they weren't able to download it, but that's completely untrue imo.
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