iTunes, MP3′s, pirates – is the record industry lying to us?

The music recording industry has always been regarded as an aggressive and self-serving group of individuals. The barrage of PR and statistics thrown at us constantly in the press and in the courts is designed to horrify us and convince us that the world is full of pirates, downloaders and criminals sapping the very life-blood from the industry.

Well it seems that – perhaps – they have been exaggerating more than a little to defend their case.

In an article in the Australian, the music recording industry across the world is accused of inflating and making up figures used in courts and in the press. The accusations come not from the paper, but from the Australian Attorney General’s Department itself.

According to the newspaper, the document prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology, lashes the music and software sectors.

The draft of the institute’s intellectual property crime report, sighted by the paper shows that copyright owners "failed to explain" how they reached financial loss statistics used in lobbying activities and court cases.

Figures for 2005 from the global Business Software Association showing $361 million a year of lost sales in Australia are "unverified and epistemologically unreliable", the report says.

Researcher Alex Malik, working for the AIC under a commission from the Attorney-General’s Department and IP Australia, was particularly critical of the use of statistics in court.

"Of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law," the draft reads.

Now don’t get us wrong, we abhor the copying and pirating of other peoples work, but what concerns us is the way in which powerful lobby group push figures onto the world that are just plain lies.

The Australian outlines that the document is a draft document and indicates that it expects the final document to be watered down once it’s been through the hands of various interest groups.

In a previous reports we discussed how lobbyist groups in various industries use the process of ‘common parlance’ to promote incorrect figures through tame and lazy journalist. Effectively, if you repeat something enough times it will become ‘common parlance’ and the public will accept the facts, no matter how incorrect they are.

The industry is going through a tough time, the distribution and marketing processes it built over the last fifty years are being torn down by digital distribution and low cost, high reach, guerilla marketing. But instead of fighting back by moving with the times, the industry is fighting back by obfuscation.

The industry should be embracing the ability to reach new markets and new consumers. We are delighted that iTunes and other such online stores give us the ability to instantly download songs from obscure bands or our early teens.

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