14 DAY TRIAL // A BBC radio show has recently investigated and proved the fact that some interpretation errors in surveys taken in the UK have led to a hugely exaggerated number of P2P file sharers. The British Government was planning to use this figure in issuing some P2P banning / limiting laws across the UK's territory in the next months.
Radio show “Less or More,” which airs on BBC 4 in the UK, is recognized as a statistics breakdown machine, focusing on different research studies, investigating and showing if they are really accurate or miserably off the target.
In one of the September shows, the crew decided to investigate one of UK's advisory panels (Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property) surveys, which showed that seven million UK citizens were engaged in illegal file sharing activities.
It seems that SABIP commissioned a research from the University College London regarding this topic, but when the investigating crew took a closer look at that study, it never mentioned the seven million figure anywhere in its content.
After talking to the study's author, it was revealed that the SABIP study was published by Forrester Research, an independent technology and market research company that also published a similar research by the same author, a study sponsored by another UK advisory board, the Music Trade Body (BPI) and carried out by Jupiter Research.
Analyzing the other report, the BBC reporters showed that the survey figures were quite bogus. The seven million P2P file shares were rounded from 6.7 million, number which was calculated from a survey taken on only 1,176 people, from which only 11.6% answered affirmative to file sharing. Now, if we quickly compute all these numbers, we get that only 136 people have transformed into 7 million results and have sentenced the UK population to a P2P banning / limiting law.
But the errors didn't stop there either. It seems that the 11.6% was outrageously adjusted to the bigger value of 16.3%, because someone from Jupiter Research thought that fewer people would ever admit to file sharing on a survey. Also, Jupiter took it another step further when it used its figure of 40 million people in the UK that have Internet access, and so roughly getting the 6.7 million result, which was later rounded at 7 million.
So, doing another round of calculations (using the Government’s own official statistics of 33.9 million Internet users), we'll reveal that the survey's real result is 3.9 million instead of the 7 million mark.