They must be joking

It always amazes me the things they say on the BBC. Take for example, this article...

The offensive quotes:

Around seven million people in the UK are involved in illegal downloads, costing the economy tens of billions of pounds, government advisers say.

Researchers found 1.3m people using one file-sharing network on one weekday and estimated that over a year they had free access to material worth £12bn.

What's so bad about this? Well, lots.

But lets look at the Really Big Number They estimate that these downloaders can access 12 Billion pounds worth of stuff. That's a LOT of stuff. No, really.

If we said that an hours TV was worth £1 per hour - and given that the average season of a TV show on amazon is less then £25 for anything that isn't the Last Season Gone this is a fair assumption. Lets say we've had 200 TV stations broadcasting new material for the last 60 years, 24/7, saved it and that it's all available on line, thats...um....60*365*24*200=105.12 million hours of TV.

Or about 1% of the 12 billion total.

Lets assume that there are 1000 films made every year for the last 60 years, at about £10 per film. Given they seem to be selling most for less then £6 of late... thats 1000*60*10 = 0.6 million - not enough to even worth putting into a percentage of 12 billion.

Music - lets call it 10,000 tracks a year...no...100,000 tracks a year, for 60 years, at £1 a track - aka typical ITunes prices - that's 6 million.

Books...for sake of argument, say that 4 times the number of books in project guttenburg covers the period to 1900 (so about 100,000), and since then 1 million a year for 110 years, at £5 per book. Thats (100,000 + 1,000,000*110) * 5 = 0.5505 billion pounds worth.

So with a bunch of assumptions so large I could fly the Starship Enterprise through them I can just, almost, make 1 Billion Pounds of media. Well, maybe 0.7 billion.

Assumptions like:

*All this material is available
*300 music tracks are made a day
*3000 books are written a day
*All TV content is only shown once, ever
*All TV content is worth £1 - including commercials, 24 hour news, blue peter

I'm not sure there's enough media on the planet to actualy come to £12,000,000,000 total.