Study: At Least 25 Million Americans Pirate Movies
Roughly 25 million Americans — or 18 percent of the U.S. online population — have illegally downloaded a full-length movie, a study released Wednesday asserts.
In a study of 2,600 Americans polled via telephone and online, Digital Life America, a unit of Solutions Research Group, found that 32 million Americans had downloaded a movie at some point in the past.
Of that number, 80 percent of those users — or 25.6 million Americans
— exclusively used peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, the vast majority
of which have typically been used for exchanging copyrighted files. The
number of regular file-sharing users doubled between 2005 and 2006, the
study found.“It’s all inclusive but as we note a few lines down, 80 percent of
downloaders use only P2P,” said Kaan Yigit, the director of the study,
in an email Wednesday night. “CinemaNow!, MovieLink, Amazon Unbox are
miniscule at this point – iTunes accounts for bulk of whatever legal
downloads there is.”
The study’s authors didn’t clarify whether “downloaded” implied illegal
downloads or participation in legal services such as CinemaNow! Some
file-sharing sites, such as BitTorrent.org, have also signed deals with
movie houses for legal distribution of licensed films. The authors of
the study did not respond to a request for clarification by post time.The perspective is that users simply don’t care, or believe, that that
the studios are being hurt by piracy, the self-funded study found. The
survey revealed that 78 percent of those surveyed found that physcially
stealing a DVD from a store was a serious offense, but only 40 percent
believed copying the movie digital also merited a serious offense. The
study pointed out that those surveyed described an example of a
“serious offense” as parking in a fire lane.
“There is a Robin Hood effect — most people perceive celebrities and
studios to be rich already and as a result don’t think of movie
downloading as a big deal,” Yigit said, in a statement. “The current
crop of ‘download to own’ movie services and the new ones coming into
the market will need to offer greater flexibility of use, selection and
low prices to convert the current users to their services — otherwise
file-sharing will continue to thrive.”The study also found:
- A typical movie downloader is 29 years of age; 63 percent of all downloaders are male, and 37 percent are female.
- A downloader typically has 16 full-length movies stored on his PC.
- Of those surveyed, 56 percent watched a DVD on a PC at some
point, while 29 percent watched a DVD on a PC in the last month. About
25 percent have watched a streaming TV show on their PC.The study’s authors estimated their error rates at plus or minus 2.4 percent.
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