The mystery of where all the money has gone isn’t just puzzling economists and estate agents. It’s also one that has had the music industry on edge, time after time. Thus, we saw the release last week of some ”research” that said 7 million people “use” illegal downloads in the UK, “costing the economy billions of pounds and thousands of jobs” . I’m unhappy to say that it was repeated in this paper. Had I seen it sooner, I would have queried the assertion about the cost to the economy. The number of people doing downloads sounds near enough right, however.Still, Ben Goldacre eviscerated the claims in Saturday’s paper, in his Bad Science column, pointing out that if every illicit download were a lost sale, then we would be missing about a 10th of GDP. Though on checking he found it was only a 100th of our GDP. (Oopsy, someone missed a decimal point.) Even so, it’s the sort of amount that you don’t overlook. And one that doesn’t stand to reason. It’s too big.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/11/charles-arthur-filesharing-piracy
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