The TUC used to be portrayed as a carthorse

It would be unfair to charcterise the Europe-wide survey being promoted in the UK by the Trades Union Congress as effectively a load of waffle-iron run-off, but it is:

Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said the study stresses that "the growth of unauthorised filesharing, downloading and streaming of copyrighted works and recorded performances is a major threat to the creative industries in terms of loss of employment and revenues".

"The scale of the problem is truly frightening now – let alone in the future if no firm actions against illegal filesharing are taken. If there was ever the proof needed to demonstrate why the Digital Economy Bill is imperative for the protection of our creative industries, this report is it."

Except it's not "truly frightening now", is it? For an industry which isn't actually selling anything essential [not in the food and shelter sense] and whose stuff is so easy to get without paying, the music business is doing pretty well - especially what with the way the general economy has been. Sony Music is happy to spend millions on buying up the Michael Jackson back catalogue. There's money to fly Dappy to America. Admittedly, both those thoughts frighten me, but not in the way you mean.

Let's fling some figures around, though, shall we?

Across the EU, as many as 1.2m jobs are in jeopardy as piracy looks set to strip more than €240bn (£218bn) in revenues from the creative industries by 2015, unless regulators can stem the flow. In 2008, the creative industries contributed €860bn to the EU's GDP – almost 7% – and it employs 6.5% of the EU workforce, or 14 million people.

It's also expected that as many as sixty million kittens might be crushed under steamrollers driven by online pirates. "They'll be laughing as they roll forward" warned the TUC, "laughing as the kittens get squished."

Of course, there's not really any reason to assume that the lack of an ever-more-tightened copyright regime would lead to steamrollers heading out over kittens, but the contention is about as strong as the figures being offered here. No attempt is made to prove the vital contention that downloading a thing represents the loss of any revenue at all; no explanation of what would happen to that £218billion pounds if it isn't being spent on buying Dollshouse on DVD or Climie Fisher CDs.

In fact, even if the survey had any basis in fact, you might argue that it'd be better for our economy if people spent the money that would otherwise be jammed away in Simon Cowell's back pocket or servicing EMI's massive debt with an American bank on, say, solar panels or eating out. Imagine if that £218bn "lost" to the creative industries found its way into the manufacturing industry.

If only it wasn't a non-existent pile of cash. Imagine the stuff we could do with it.

Give Chico a Chico timecard, says Equity

Good luck with that, then, Equity: The actors union is trying to get ITV to pay the X Factor contestants:

The union is to table a motion at next month's TUC conference calling on TV companies to pay talent show contestants.

The motion will read: ''The contestants in such programmes are often compelled to enter into restrictive contracts and because of a loophole in the National Minimum Wage Act for competitions they generally do not get paid.

''These programmes may be very popular with the public but are based on exploitation and humiliation of vulnerable people, which cannot be acceptable. The public's demand for high quality entertainment should be met by professional drama and light entertainment which has been replaced by this cheap exploitation.''

This follows on from Equity's ultimately unsuccessful attempt last year to secure minimum wage for animals which do the funniest things.

Seriously, the idea isn't as unlikely as it sounds - the BBC pays for people who take part in their singy-singy shows when they're at the 'coming back week-in, week-out' stages - but you suspect the real thinking behind Equity's call is that their core membership are finding fewer and fewer jobs because reality TV is much cheaper to make. If you can make reality TV costs shoot up a little... well... that gap will start to close a bit, won't it?

Save the creative industries (as they are now) cry the creative industries

People with a vested interest have called on the government to try and stop 'illegal' downloading:

A coalition of creative industries organisations, including the UK's biggest trade union, Amicus/Unite, have increased the pressure on the government to act against illegal downloading in next week's final Digital Britain report, saying that there will otherwise be large job losses in TV, film and music across the UK.

Yes, the TUC have got involved. The TUC, you'll recall, tend to be depicted as a carthorse in classic political cartoons. Which is just silly, because carthorses are part of a bygone age, bypassed by the march of technology and... oh, hang on...

The letter argues that illegal filesharing is not a "victimless crime" but one that will result in revenue losses that will mean "fewer films, songs and TV programmes [will be] able to be commissioned".

"Job losses will be felt right across the chain, from production to distribution, from technicians to manufacturers and from logistics companies to staff in high street shops," states the co-signed letter.

Hang about a moment... won't jobs in shops and warehouses vanish if art gets distributed digitally anyway? Regardless of if you're downloading a licensed or unlicensed version of Terminator 6, there's not much call for a bloke with a van or forklift trucks wooshing crates of plastic all over the place, is there? More than ever, the sense hangs that the cries of "we must stop pirates" are actually "please make the future go away".

Let's distribute plastic records. We can get a carthorse to drag them to the shops.