Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/05/ben-goldacre-bad-science-music-downloads

This article in the Guardian shows how the attempts by the music industry to claim that illegal downloading is costing them enormous sums of money per year continue to be undermined by the sheer ludicrousness of the claims. As The Sun newspaper breathlessly reported:

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.

As writer Ben Goldacre points out:

That's about a tenth of our GDP.

Hmmmm. At this point I begin to smell a rat. We have a credulity issue right there. Let's drill into this a bit more:

But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73bn items downloaded each year, worth £120bn. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. This already seems rather high. I am not an economist, 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.
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.

By now it should be clear that these numbers are, to put it mildly, rather exaggerated. But...wait for it:

Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473m items and £12bn (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.

So...we have a recording industry body that multiplied its monetary loss estimates by a factor of 10 before publishing them? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked...and people wonder why the recording industry cannot gain any traction for it's plight? Maybe if they were to stop producing hyperbolic crap like this, stop suing their customers, and eat some crow, they might stand a chance of survival. However, I am not holding my breath...