heystoopid used our news submit to tell us "Whilst reading the local Murdoch daily newspaper over the usual cup of latte, I noticed this article about the alledged sale of illegal pirate DVD movie copies at the various local Sunday Flea markets, spread over this metropolis of Melbourne consisting of approximately 4 million souls. Interestingly, I loved the first paragraph "ONE in every 12 DVDs sold in Australia is pirated, with Victoria ranking as the country's worst offender." Note the value of Au$193 million in claimed losses because of these pirates, strangely, in the majority of industry RIAA/MPAA/CPAA/ARIA (Australian version RIAA!) /Microsoft all claim/indicate a level of one in three CD's/DVD's & MS software sold is pirated.
Now this Murdoch broadsheet says one in twelve, this is very confusing to me! In another unrelated article of same day, in the business section, titled " Aussie films given the flick" shows that in 2004, the Hollywood releases in this country truly bombed with the top 5 of 2004 earning as much as the childrens movie "The Cat in the Hat". Now I am truly confused, does that mean the average Australian prefers Dr. Seuss, or did Hollywood fly a lot of poorly made Turkeys in 2004? Or does this explain why 2005, is now rapidly becoming the year of poorly made clone-an-oldie like "war of the worlds" (I use small letters because the trailer I saw was truly awful, showing lack of plot etc., But man, those Linux powered graphic special effects seemed to be working overtime to cover the ham in the acting though!) Ah, to be confused and bewildered at the same time, oh how to decipher fact from fabrication and fiction here?????"
We sure are getting a lot of news from Down Under this week! Some of us may agree with this member of CD Freaks, as it seems that anyone can pull just the right statistics out of their hat in order to underline their point or further a cause. In addition, as many have commented here, carefully crafted survey questions can skew the results terribly. Possibly, I'm a bit cynical, but it seems whenever a study is paid for by a certain interest group, say the RIAA, then the results of the study reflect their emotional state or stance. This one says it's "independant" but can we be sure? I guess we have to get our information from a variety of sources and then like heystoopid, sit down and analyse the information ourselves...preferably over a latte or some other sophisticated drink. 😉
Source: The Herald Sun
