Have you downloaded movies from the Internet?
We give the MPAA a helping hand
Posted in Bootnotes, 13th July 2004 09:27 GMT
Free whitepaper – Dell solid stats disk (SSD) drives
Poll We at Vulture Central are completely shocked, nay flabbergasted, this morning by the revelation today that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been a little "creative" with its figures regarding illegal movie downloads.
To summarise, the MPAA has declared that "About one in four Internet users has downloaded a movie", - a truly horrific figure which points to a sickness at the very core of modern society.
Or it would, if it weren't complete baloney. In fact, the figure represents a claimed percentage of broadband users - not the entire online community. Even as a percentage of broadband users, the figure looks highly suspect.
It's clear that the MPAA needs a helping hand in getting its fact straight. Accordingly, we have put together a simple online poll to help that hapless organisation determine just how serious the downloading problem is.
We're asking readers to be completely honest here: have you or have you not downloaded video material from the Internet? Give it to us straight:
Important notice
We are obliged to all those readers who have emailed us since this ground-breaking piece of research went live to point out at great length how our investigative methodology is truly, madly and deeply flawed.
There is, however, a clue to what's really going here. Try the line: "No, I prefer my pornography in stills format".
Still none the wiser? Try this:
![]()

Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Enabling The Agile Data Center
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit

Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers?
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Fedora 12 polishes Linux for netbooks
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter