America Overrun With Pirates

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Research in the US looking at online copyright infringement found that 70% of 18 to 29-year-olds have illegally downloaded music, movies or TV shows. Yet two-thirds of these pirates pay for content as well. The figures are derived from research for a report named Copy Culture in the US and Germany, compiled by the same team who published the Media Piracy In Developing Economies report earlier this year.

The data were collected from a telephone poll of 2300 American adults surveyed in August. Amongst the findings was that 46% of all Americans have engaged in piracy on at least one occasion, although the figures were skewed significantly towards younger people.

The pattern of content piracy was mostly casual rather than hard-core mass downloading. Only 2% of Americans are “heavy music pirates”, possessing over 1000 illegal music tracks. Less than a third of pirates said their whole collection was illegally obtained. Many of the small-time pirates have modified their behaviour as a result of more reasonably-priced legal alternatives.

One such is Netflix, which has led to 40% of pirates reducing the amount of pirate material software they’d possess. The survey reveals that piracy is not gender specific – the number of men involved in piracy was within 2% of the number of women. Assuming male the and female respondents were equally honest in replying to the survey, of course.

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