Australian Report Questions Copyright Financial Loss Statistics

A confidential briefing for the Attorney-General's Department, 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 Australian 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.

BSAA chairman Jim Macnamara said the figure was an extrapolation, but other studies had supported it. "They're entitled to say they're not convinced, but not necessarily entitled to say it's unverified," he said. The study, which says some of the statistics used by copyright owners are "absurd", will be redrafted after senior researchers disagreed with its conclusions.

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