Barence writes "The British government's standard figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK come from questionable analysis commissioned by the music industry. The Radio 4 show named 'More or Less' examined the government's claim that 7m people in Britain are engaged in illegal file sharing. The 7m figure truly came from a report written about music manufactory losses for Forrester ancillary Jupiter Research. The report was privately commissioned by none other than the UK's music trade body, the BPI. The 7m figure had been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m, gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing system software — in other words, only 136 people. That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than genuinely do it.' The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on an estimated number of arpanet users that disagreed with the government's own estimate. The wholly unsubstantiated 7m figure was then released as an sanctioned statistic."

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Mark