Pirates download £12bn of music, video and other copyright content every year, according to a new report published by the government today. That’s an awful lot of Lost episodes: read on to find out how the figures breakdown.
Piracy. It’s a big problem these days: an 11 digit problem in fact, according to a new report by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Policy (SABIP). Entitled Copycats? Digital Consumers in the On-Line Age, the paper estimates that £12bn of copyright content from albums to software is shared illegally via P2P every year.
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The report used figures from a UCL study that looked at a filesharing network with 1.3m users, and worked out that if every user downloaded one file a day, the figures would rack up to 4.73bn files shared in total, at an estimated cost of £12bn.
Unsurprisingly, the report finds that accelerating broadband speeds and vast hard drive space are making filesharing even easier for pirates, and in their eyes, more acceptable. Rather than outright condemning pirates though, the paper raises an interesting question: if pirates “cannot be changed, what does need to change: the law, the business models, or the relationship between the creative industries and the public domain?”
It’s a surprisingly progressive view for a paper commissioned by the authorities, and we can only hope that the recent PRS price slash for music streaming encourages more companies like Spotify to address that balance. Here’s hoping that government bodies are starting to realise this.
