Government Lied Over Piracy Stats

Seems the government's figures for illegal downloaders are a Big Fat Lie.

Now we know Labour lies a lot. We know Gordon Brown lies a lot. We know Mandelson lies in the same way most other people breathe. So I guess I shouldn't be shocked.

Shouldn't be too shocked that BBC News swallowed the lies either I suppose, quality journalism is quietly dying a death there. It actually fell to the BBC4 program More or Less to fisk it.

Let's have a look at the figures, the government said it was 7 million people, based on the following math...

In a 2008 survey, of 1,176 households, 136 people said they'd used file sharing software. That's 11.6%.

That was bumped up to 16.3% for unspecified reasons, but we're supposed to believe it wasn't extracted from any rectal passageways.

The next assumption is that there are 40 million internet users, however the BPI, who have a vested interest in saying Piracy Is Bad, came up with this figure, despite official figures from the ONS showing there are 33.9 million.

So even if you took a sample size of just over a thousand as representative, using the values actually provided you get under 4 million. Even accepting the 16.3% rate puts you just over 4 million.

Lies, damned lies and statistics indeed!