Lies and Statistics
I love this story out of the UK on copyright and the costs of piracy. Ben Goldacre tries to figure out where the loss figures come from, and the ultimate sources (and methods used to count up losses) are just amazing:
What is the origin of this conservative figure? I hunted down the full Ciber documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one-page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed "background", among five other points, it says: "Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10bn and 4,000 jobs." An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release.
Now if only it were that easy to make industry analysts in the software field think you have a mainstream solution - I'd have our PR people issue a press release and call it a day :)
Update: Like this :)
Comments
In other news...
[Randal L. Schwartz] June 7, 2009 12:39:30.559
"Industry experts estimate that the collective worldwide programmer productivity losses by failing to use Smalltalk-based environments (such as Cincom's VisualWorks) could approach 700,000 dollars per day."