The study was conducted by Kaspar Media and involved online and face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of 4400 people. It was financially supported by the UK IPO.
The UK’s Digital Economy Act provides for warning letters to be sent to internet subscribers who have downloaded illegal content. But its implementation has been delayed by legal challenges, and the first letters are not expected to be sent out until the middle of 2014 at the earliest.
Of those surveyed, just 22% indicated that a letter suspending their internet access would put them off, while only 14% said they would be put off by a letter restricting their internet speed.
The report also found that:
One in six (16%) UK internet users aged 12+ were estimated to have downloaded or streamed/accessed at least one item of online content illegally over the three month period May-July 2012.4 A quarter of these (4%) only consumed illegal content.5
31% of those consuming any film content and 23% of those consuming any music content had done so illegally.
Online copyright infringers across all the content types were more likely to be male (58%), 16-34 (64%) and ABC1 (62%).
47% of all computer software products consumed online were estimated to be illegally obtained, followed by films (35%) and music (26%), whereas it was lowest for books (12%).
But for music, film and TV programmes, those who consumed a mixture of legal and illegal content claimed to spend more on that type of content over the three-month period than those who consumed 100% legally or 100% illegally.
