Big Content's busiest mouthpiece says:
It is the Internet, that all-embracing technological marvel, which is putting to hazard our attempts to protect precious creative property. Viant, a Boston-based consulting firm, has estimated that some 350,000+ movies are being downloaded from the Internet every day ñ all of them illegal. [emphasis his]
thanks, Jack.
you can still get the Viant report cited. they proudly note that Jack Valenti used the report ("The Copyright Crusade") in previous scare-mongering testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
according to the report, the "350,000 downloads" number was ginned out of a weeklong sample of IRC file-trading activity. the IRC profile was subsequently applied against "self-reporting" P2P networks (like Napster or Gnutella) activity (ie, given x nodes and y files, z files can be assumed to have been traded). the resulting numbers were smoothed out with media reports for the less transparent networks (like Aimster). I admit that this is about as thorough as you can get. it's also probably wildly inaccurate.
of course, the report's author (the guy who would ostensibly be selling Viant's services to some Big Content multinational) explicitly warns his readers about the quality of the figures:
"It has been our intention to present a balanced and educated view of these phenomena, not to rigorously prove any specific metrics for piracy."
yet that's exactly what Valenti does -- present these scary numbers as authoritative proof that digital piracy is a threat to Big Content. I haven't seen statistics abused this badly since I was in my last round of VC pitches ("oh, yeah -- the market's going to be $20 billion within five years. CSFB, Goldman Sachs, and Jupiter all say so!").
I say these numbers are junk, and they're being used irresponsibly by ruthless people.
