Wikinomics: New Kids On The Block Hit #1

New Kids On The Block Hit #1, Neon Pink is all the rage, Maple Leafs make the playoffs
Ian Da Silva

Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? Remember the good ol’ days? I sure do, and so does my “favourite” organization – the MPAA, for they seem to still be living in this fabled period of time…

This post was inspired by the coincidence of two pieces of related news that really got my attention yesterday – the admission of a very significant error by the MPAA and a blog post that I read, highlighting the potential for an increasingly affected Net Generation to exert their influence in the next Canadian federal election.

In a report released Tuesday, the MPAA revealed that a major statistic from its groundbreaking 2005 study proclaiming that college students were stealing nearly half of their industry’s revenue was wrong – nearly 300% wrong. The original report claimed that 44% of the motion picture industry’s domestic revenue losses were a result of illegal downloading over campuses’ high speed networks. While skeptics knew that 44% seemed quite high, students were an easy target, and the study was used to encourage (and almost legally mandate) that colleges across the US beef up their anti-piracy efforts. Yesterday’s release proves that the skeptics were right and that such gaping losses were NOT caused by student downloads (but rather by a stone-aged business model – sorry, I couldn’t resist interjecting my two cents) and that the true figure is actually closer to 15%, with “human error” to blame for the discrepancy.