You represent a terrible egotism – I want this now, therefore I’m allowed it now. You’re spoilt children, having silly tantrums over shiny things you can’t have.

But, right now, you’re being used; being used in a public policy ‘debate’, by ambitious politicians and business-blinded lobbyists. And, on balance, I dislike these people and their ends more.

This week saw the publishing of a report by SABIP claiming ‘a rise in economic losses sustained by unauthorised downloading’.

It’s actually a pretty good and thorough report – though it’s a review rather than original research, and undertaken with the usual economic/industry bias.

But the executive summary is much more apocalyptic and negative than the report as a whole – one might say ‘sexed up’. It makes chilling reading – £10 billion in monetary losses; 4,000 jobs; £12 billion stolen by the users of one small peer-to-peer network annually; who knows the figure for the whole of the internet! As the summary says “these figures are staggering”.

Yes they are. And also utter, utter nonsense. Maybe the figures aren’t supposed to be the kind that stand up to simple scrutiny. Perhaps they’re of the good-enough-for-a-powerpoint-slide-or-spreadsheet-or-press-release type.

But, even the most innumerate of us will wonder how 4,000 jobs relates to a £10bn loss – unless each of those potential employees earn/costs £2.5m a year.

Some of us will wonder further. When the summary says that a season of 24 is worth £5, wouldn’t that imply that 4.2 million years of content are being downloaded annually to make up this £12bn in stolen value.

To put it another way, with these numbers, even if every broadband-connected household in the UK was involved, some 48 hours of pirated content would be being watched by each of them online, every week.

And, further, we have to assume that if the content weren’t downloaded it would be paid for. Phew!

Indeed “these figures are staggering”. Staggeringly stupid and cherry-picked to get headlines, I’d say. The numbers imply a very odd world, one that I’m certain doesn’t really exist. (I’m being a little unfair by not splitting the numbers into UK v. world losses, but it’s not that clear in the report’s summary either).

Even given these ridiculous numbers, the report says that it’s going to get worse – 50mps broadband can deliver 10 hours of music in five minutes! Imagine how much more people will listen to when it can be downloaded so quickly! It will only take 12 minutes to download a whole 24hrs of music.

I’m guessing that the fear is that young folks find a way to consume more than 24 hours of content in a day – then we’ll be in trouble. Or not.

My favourite bit:

“The new generation of broadband access at 50mbs can deliver 200 mp3 music files in five minutes, the unauthorised DVD of “Star Wars” in three minutes, and the complete digitized works of Charles Dickens in less than ten.”

Now, leave aside the fact that Charles Dickens’ work is now out-of-copyright and perfectly right, proper and good to share. It’s some deep level of digital ignorance that thinks that in terms of file size the order goes music > video > text. Do these folks not use email? This is a soundbite drop-in: false but designed to be easily repeatable. And, I’d warrant, it must have been written by someone who is digitally illiterate – just the peeps you want setting digital policy.

It’s obviously too much to ask for a simple model of file-sharing activity – one in which the numbers add up and doesn’t point to some coming digital apocalypse. Because that’s not where we’re heading. There is a hard limit on how much digital content we can possibly consume – time.

There is clearly no strict equivalence between the amount of content downloaded, the amount consumed and the amount that would otherwise have been bought. Refusing that is where these silly numbers come from. There is no secret ‘dark’ £10bn (or was it £12bn?), just waiting to be delivered to Bono and his mates, in trucks.

Sigh, but you can bet it’ll be the big numbers that are picked up by the media and repeated and exaggerated and the government set public internet policy off the back of them. Public internet policy that will be restrictive and designed to appease the industry lobbyists – ignorant of our individual rights and utterly disproportionate.