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32% of All US Adults Watch Pirated Content (torrentfreak.com)
Nearly a third of all US adults admit to having downloaded or streamed pirated movies or TV-shows, a new survey has found. Even though many are aware that watching pirated content is not permitted, a large number of pirates are particularly hard to deter. According to a report from TorrentFreak: This is one of the main conclusions of research conducted by anti-piracy firm Irdeto, which works with prominent clients including Twentieth Century Fox and Starz. Through YouGov, the company conducted a representative survey of over 1,000 respondents which found that 32 percent of all US adults admit to streaming or downloading pirated video content. These self-confessed pirates are interested in a wide variety of video content. TV-shows and movies that still play in theaters are on the top of the list for many, with 24 percent each, but older movies, live sports and Netflix originals are mentioned as well. The data further show that the majority of US adults (69%) know that piracy is illegal. Interestingly, this also means that a large chunk of the population believes that they're doing nothing wrong.
Most of those reasons for pirating are because they can't get the content very easily in a legal way. I guess most people are willing to pay, as long as it doesn't get too complicated.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you download & watch an old and obscure movie - which is not available anywhere for sale or rental - is it still pirating when there's no possible loss to anyone ?
Same question for old music, books, software ...
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I do believe that watching something you are not entitled to might be listed under copyright infrigement, but if you streamed a pirated video, you yourself didn't commit something illegal if my understanding is good (at least in Canada). So, 69% are wrong ?
I pay for a lot of content through Dish, Netflix, iTunes, etc but if there's something I can't find there (and it happens more than I would have thought possible) then I don't even hesitate. It's 2017 and I want everything ever made and I want it at the click of a mouse or press of a button on my remote. I understand that it isn't something I'm in any way entitled to but that's how the world works a lot of the time now. Sorry.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
It's only illegal to make copies of copyrighted content without license. So torrenting = illegal. Streaming = legal.
I don't respond to or upvote ACs
* 32% of US adults *admit* to watching pirated content.
Interestingly, this also means that a large chunk of the population believes that they're doing nothing wrong.
No, I'd say this means that a large chunk of the population believe that the value of the product (content) offered plus the probable cost to acquire the content is less than the sale price. People who watch pirated content are aware that what they are doing is not 100% clean. Most will shrug when asked if what they are doing is legal.
Unless the sale price drops or the probable cost to acquire the content rises, the value of the product (content) must increase to decrease pirating.
So, if you don't want to decrease the price point, and you can't think of an economical way to increase the probable cost to acquire the content, then you have to increase the value of the product. How can you increase its value? Well, for one, make it as easy as possible to get a copy of the content legally, and make that product as easy to use (for all values of use) as the pirated version.
However, content owners will simply view the equation as a need to come up with a cheap way to make the probable cost of acquiring the content alternately more expensive. Through higher rates of fining, or higher fines, or making piracy more difficult to achieve.
Changing the usability of the content or decreasing the price point are things the studios simply won't consider.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
When a third of your population admit to doing something illegal, maybe it's time to revisit the laws surrounding the legality of it - especially if it isn't a safety issue.
Sorry but the survey only lists that it was an online survey. How was this sample selected, and where if the response rate? Since I see no delineation between Sample Size and Completes I assume this was just a meaningless web survey that wasted their time weighting data that has no meaning because it's missing critical data points. This is how the media got deluded into believing Hillary was destined to win VS Trump. Honestly, if you're going to include a methods section then give me a bit more meat.
They believe that by pirating an old movie that they refuse to make available on DVD or streaming, you're not paying to watch the latest Transformers flick.
68% of US adults lie about watching pirated content.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Through YouGov, the company conducted a representative survey of over 1,000 respondents" ... no, on two accounts. 1) Self-selected survey (YouGov) and 2) 1000 respondents aren't statistically representative for the US population
it's in my head
It's not like all shows are available at a price and you just refused to pay it.
Content is often... /your country/
Old so not available
Not available in
Not available when you want to watch it
Has commercials
Better quality elsewhere, ability to pause play rewinid at your leisure.
Basically as usual, pirated content has the better product, even if you had to "pay" for it.
Stop restricting content by country
Stop restricting content to try and force people to accept certain content.
Oh yeah, they do it, fyi, deliberately pull other popular content from access just to get people watching their "new" show. It's like products, installing updates or things that cause it to run worse but it's a "security update" until they tell you to buy a newer, faster shinier product.
They keep trying to section off markets to milk the most of it etc. If instead, part of harmonization the entire world, allowed content to be accessible on a global level with specific standards for quality control, performance and user interfaces (As every company wants a piece of the pie) you would have a lot less people pirating.
I don't even watch netflix anymore because I've already seen anything good and their library is started to suck ass. I only keep it since a family member watches it still.
Pirates have global access to high quality on demand content of their choosing, free for the most part no less.
Your expensive services are terrible and don't even come close.
There's a lot of content I'd like to watch and would pay for access to watch it, but I can't, then you whine and complain because I'm not buying the products you want me to.
Or downloading a show that failed to record because it was pre-empted by sports (or damaged by poor reception).
There is no "mass piracy" going on. There are pirates who won't pay for anything, because they thing they are awesome and don't have to be functioning members of society, because they think they are better than all those "idiots" (everyone else). I know of a guy that pirates movies he never watches, because he thinks it is cool. He has thousands of movies in his "collection", more than any human could watch in a lifetime. He is a mass offender.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The data further show that the majority of US adults (69%) know that piracy is illegal. Interestingly, this also means that a large chunk of the population believes that they're doing nothing wrong.
No. That means 31% of the population doesn't know the law, which is a little hard to believe.
Knowing that it's illegal and believing that you're doing something wrong are completely different issues.
Nope, no sig
I am reasonable sure the majority of people in my neighborhood here in science-hating Texas have no idea how to set up their routers to allow torrent uploads and avoid leeching limitations.
Who said anything about torrents? My kids (9 and 11) know how to type "[movie name] full movie" and "[show name] season X episode X" into google and start streaming a show in seconds. If they have figured this out then most adults have likely figured it out too.
A similar number of adults admit to speeding. If caught they can get a small fine and a temporary increase in their insurance premiums.
Where as piracy you can be sued into bankruptcy and potentially imprisoned with other horrible criminals.
Yet only one of these activities risks human life.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I have a full cable package from Frontier. We get most of the premium channels including HBO, Showtime and Starz. My wife purchases way more DVDs and Blu-ray discs than I want her to. We also go to the theater from time to time to watch movies.
I am not willing to pay for the same content over, and over and over again. I am especially unwilling to continue to pay for content due to wear and tear. For example, my wife has watched Friends and Sex in the City so many times that some of the discs skip or are even completely unwatchable. I have zero qualms with pulling down a torrent of those shows and storing them on the NAS so that she can watch them.
Another example is with HBO content. I am on the west coast. I watched Game of Thrones and Westworld on east coast time plus about 30 minutes. It was more convenient for me torrent a 1080p rip, than to wait until HBO decided it was time for my part of the country to be "allowed" to watch it.
Am I 'stealing' from HBO? Am I 'stealing' from the DVD / blu-ray producer?
I worked in Hollywood for a while. I understand that all of the below the line people have to eat and deserve to make a living wage. I do not endorse out and out, wholesale piracy. Just because "the studios" are turning a profit does not mean that everyone involved in getting content onto the screen is rolling in dough. Most of them are just regular Joe and Jane Doe's, putting in their hours and trying to put food on the table.
On the other hand, I am okay with preserving content that I paid for. Just because I have the technical capability of doing so should not make it wrong. In my eyes, it is no more wrong than a mechanic fixing their own vehicle. Are they 'stealing' from the dealership service departments? They have to buy their tools and parts. I have to buy my computers and storage medium.
In the U.S., I thought it was only those who share who have been prosecuted or sued, not those who merely download -- due in part to the Betamax decision.
At the hospital I work at, I've noticed that a lot more people are watching pirated content. It's no where near the 32% mentioned in the summary, but certainly a much larger percentage than 5 years ago. I basically find out as we discuss various old movies and give each other suggestions on what to watch.
The interesting thing is how these people are getting the movies. It seems that they're getting 'hot boxes', which are apparently copies of Kodi with a set of streaming plugins to pirate sites. These guys (and girls) are not particularly tech-oriented. All they know is that the movies are streamed from pirate websites.
How these people don't get caught is beyond me. But none of them are concerned with the legality of it.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Weekly stories of woh coming from the big studios, as they annually report profits in the BILLIONS. Then they expect Joe-citizen to pony up and hour or more worth income every time they decide to watch their legally licensed content on a different device? Cry me a river.
Its funny, when you make laws that are so slanted, so in favor of the few, and so at the expense of the many, people just decide not to respect those laws. Then when you try to enforce these laws, people don't respect the enforcer. When you finally find a way to enforce these laws, people lose even more respect for the law, the enforcer, the body that stands to profit from the laws, the government that allowed it in the first place, and worst of all, people lose respect for the rule of law all together.
We all choose to play by this rule-set (copyright). If the game is rigged (DRM, region locking, no content shifting), we stop playing (piracy) and lose respect for the rules that we stopped playing by (copyright law) and the other players (rights-holders) and the stupid rules that we decided not to play with in first place. (copyright in general)
When first implemented, it was a good system... it fostered creation, paid out to the creators and generally was a pretty excepted way of doing things.
Over the years however, its been perverted to serve the opposite of what it was made to do, Copyright stifles creativity with the constant bogus takedown letters and violation notices, costs creators money defending original ideas, and allows studios to retain ownership of whole swaths of culture that should rightfully have fallen into public hands LONG AGO. Copyright is broken as it is now, and needs to be dialed back to reality. Once the laws are once again SANE, huge portions of the population will begin to respect it once again.
Don't even get me started on the double-dipping force feeding of commercials to consumers who've already paid (to much) for the programming on whatever format they are getting it on.....
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I acquired a lot of free ebooks from Amazon, but guess what? They don't remove them from the lists or filter them out so I stop dealing with Amazon altogether unless I know specifically what I am looking for. They have no ability to exclude what you've already gotten from them at any price point. All of the systems seem to have this problem, though. I can't begin to talk about how many Steam games I have bought only for them to clutter my searches.
a large chunk of the population believes that they're doing nothing wrong
When the piracy is against someone like Disney who swears that they will continue to buy as many lawmakers as it takes to subvert the public domain clause of the Constitution and have already done so, then I have to agree with the pirates. I also have a gripe with studios like Miramax who release lower than DVD quality on BlueRay and then try to sell the consumer a better quality release later (but continue to press and sell the poor quality BlueRay discs as well). See the Stargate BlueRay release as just one of many examples. Legally the pirates may have done something wrong, but morally the studios are the bigger pirates.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.