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Originally Posted by Tomkat
Where is this evidence that the bbc was "lying"? You tell me that my sources are mistaken, yet don't counter my argument with any sources of your own except "yeah yours are wrong, even well known/respectable news sources".
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What is the specific source for the £100,000 (or more) income? The BBC link you gave at the start of the thread quotes a policeman saying the site was "extremely lucrative" but I'm not sure what that means. £100,000 of
revenue (not profit) certainly wouldn't be extremely lucrative over a period much longer than a year. Not that it means much without knowing his costs (or seeing the books more generally).
(Not that it matters how much money he made, just to emphasise)
I doubt the BBC are "lying" in the direct sense. Their coverage suffers from the usual problems.
1. The people writing about the story don't really understand the issues involved. Or if they do they're struggling with trying to get over the nuances of the story in 200 words (the length of the beeb story).
2. They don't have enough resources to actually investigate the issues directly and so they rely on press releases. This usually comes from the police and/or the content industry representatives (the RIAA in America, the BPI for us). And so we have two quotes in the BBC initial story - one from the police, one from the BPI. In the minds of the BBC editors, this might constitute some sort of "balance", who knows.* The point is that both those bodies are going to tend to emphasise particular parts of the story - i.e. making the raids sound as justified as possible.
You don't need to "lie" in order to be unfair. The BBC in covering this story could have said :
"A police raid in the North of England has been condemned by the internet community as a 'total waste of police resources'. The raid, which resulted in the arrest of a 24 year old man and the seizure of thousands of pounds worth of equipment took place in part of the country in which more than 70% of reported robberies escape police detection. One observer noted that in an area with above-average anti-social behaviour this was the 'the firs time the police had been seen in days'.
Another said that in the two years spent investigating some computer enthusiasts, over 300 women in the Cleveland area had been raped or seriously sexually assaulted. There have been calls this evening for the Superintendent who authorised the operation to resign."
...etc. And this would all be unfair too while all notionally being true. (Probably).
* = Some might argue that the BBC shouldn't be balanced about criminals - after all, if a child is raped, we don't expect to hear a quote from the Child Molestors League to balance any coverage given. But I'd argue that the British public are a little more divided on their opinions on intellectual property than they are about child abuse, although I have no direct statistics to back this up.