Hello! If you've just joined us, we're ruining our weekend looking at the "Industry Trust for IP Awareness Limited's" claims that DVD piracy is linked to organised crime.

As part of these claims they're citing the National Criminal Intelligence Service's definition of "organised crime," the critical part of which is that the crime must be "serious," which DVD piracy isn't, so the "Industry Trust" must connect knocking out dodgy DVDs with other, serious, crimes in order to justify their own existence.

Once these connections are made, the "Industry Trust" then uses them to warrant spending huge sums of money

ie, to beat acceptance of eroded rights and vigilante voyeurs into the public because piracy blows up babies with bombs.

In previous episodes of this ridiculous post we've seen how a billboard campaign proving pirate copies are rubbish made up the picture (by implication taken from an actual pirate copy) in Photoshop or something; and tried to corroborate the widely reported "case studies," largely failing because of the lack of details and sources, but learning how to conflate, exaggerate, misrepresent and (in the couple of cases where there is independent verification) contradict your own internal reports, invent things, and lie.

Nothing whatsoever in the "Industry Trust's" claims has yet established with evidence a link between DVD piracy and organised crime. (NB: having one or more of the companies you represent copy what you tell them to say and put "I agree" at the end is not evidence.)

Today we're looking at some widely quoted statistics.

Obviously the most important place to start.

Do they? If you missed the previous instalments, this is chiefly the problem with the "Industry Trust" - they do not supply sources. And in nearly every case, searching the internets for a source via the few-to-non-existent specifics leads you right back in a loop to the "Industry Trust's" site itself.

Mind you, for this one, I can't even find a figure for the total number of licensed markets in the UK. The official organisation has just got round to a survey, but the results aren't yet in.

Anyone here go to open markets? Does "7,000" dodgy ones sound right? Or could it be "7,000" in total, and some of the people at some of the markets happen to be dodgy, but the "Industry Trust" has poorly expressed itself again? Do you think there's anything in the fact they say "pirate videos and DVDs" - perhaps taking some old, video-related figures and tacking "and DVDs" on the end? I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I know what's coming up.

Next paragraph.

And the actual numbers for those "seizures" and "actions" are... ? Any year will do, you could work out the rest like maths homework. I'd also like to know what else was "seized" and what else was on the "DVD piracy web sites" because the "Industry Trust" has a habit of promoting dodgy DVDs to exclusive conspicuousness when in fact they happened to be swept up by people interested in other, far more important things. But, again, there's no source and the search leads right back to the "Industry Trust."

"Estimated" by whom? These numbers are even quoted on faith by the BBC, but no source is given and I can't find out where they come from, except that it's the "Industry Trust" asking parts of itself to guess.

It's probably an idea to remember at this point that the standard method of "estimating" movie (and music) losses as pioneered by the RIAA (in the US) and the BPI (over here) is to assume every copy is a lost sale. In other words, anything you obtained that wasn't from a shop - a dodgy DVD, a P2P album, a C90 mix tape - you would otherwise have bought. The advantage of this method of calculating financial impact, technically known as "making it all up" is that it results in terrifyingly huge numbers and you get laws passed by idiots.

In this single case, for example, assuming a DVD cost £20 last year, the "£400m to £500m" "estimate" means they're saying there were between 20m and 25m copies in the UK in 2003, or roughly two for every household in the country. (That's on top of the £2.4bn of legit DVDs we're told were sold, as we'll see shortly.) And obviously the point of a "black market pirate DVD" is that counterfeiters undercut the real price - to £4 (or 20% of the RRP) according to Lynn Faulds-Wood's investigation - so we're really talking, what, 100m to 150m dodgy DVDs, on top of at least 120m legit ones? (Shared between the households with DVD players, which is far from all of them.) Where's everyone keeping these things? What on earth is going to happen in 2006 when the dodginess is "expected" to more than double at the same time legit sales continue to rise? Don't open any high cupboards.

See how numbers conveniently flex?

Next paragraph.

This one is extremely interesting, because "over 1.6m" people ("over 1.6m"? Why not "nearly 1.7m"?) "downloading illegal films and TV programmes every week" - that's either a minimum of 83.2m movie/TV downloads in a year, or 83.2m people downloading by December. Yikes! Obviously we've switched from the UK to worldwide. It's sleight of hand and we've silently moved from UK figures to global ones.

In fact, no. What's happened is that the "Industry Trust" have taken an old report by one of their founder members and entirely invented the "every week" part.

So even though it's their own report the "Industry Trust" can't resist punching it up by adding a big lie. The survey commissioned by "Industry Trust" centrepiece the BVA "estimated" "1.67m people" downloaded something that year, 2003 not per week. The "Industry Trust" is so confident in its claims that DVD piracy is linked to organise crime, it has to take one of the few sourced stories and INFLATE ITS OWN FINDINGS BY OVER FIVE THOUSAND PER CENT.

The numbers of the report don't even add up. How do you turn "1.67m downloads" into a "£45m loss"? Which "calculation" does that? Even the usual trick of assuming every single download is a lost sale only works if all of 2003's stock of DVDs cost at least £26 each.

If you read the original BVA version you also discover the terrible secret of these "estimated" downloaders...

... they BUY LOTS OF LEGIT DVDS. Aieee!

The BBC helpfully adds

It's the apocalypse! We're all going to die!

It's a sales bonanza! We're all fabulously rich!

(NB - in this official version, winningly titled "HELEN MIRREN CALLS ON PUBLIC TO REJECT PIRACY AS VIDEO SALES GROW BY 30 PER CENT," DVD is up 75%, not just 61%.)

See the problem that emerges with taking the "Industry Trust's" figures at face value?

There's also lots of fun to be had with the world's number one cause of movie piracy turning out to be Hollywood and other bits of Hollywood, but we'll pass over that for now.

Next paragraph.

Ah, now, these are all the "case studies" regurgitated again, which I covered last time. Skip to the next section.

Here we go. Remember that the aim of this campaign is to uncover who's REALLY behind DVD piracy - never mind all the ways they've failed to provide any evidence whatsoever of links between DVD piracy and organised crime, that was just a joke or something, it's really about terrorism, just like the posters with the armed blokes in balaclavas say (even though the "mask" face rubbing its chin looks eerily like Tim Robbins. Tim Robbins is secretly an IRA? Help!). This is where the "Industry Trust for IP Awareness Limited" bring out (er) the big guns - the indisputable, cast-iron FACTS.