'Pirates' Tend To Be the Biggest Buyers of Legal Content, Study Shows (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: According to a paywalled survey of 1,000 UK residents by anti-piracy outfit MUSO first spotted by Torrent Freak, 60 percent of those surveyed admitted that they had illegally streamed or downloaded music, film, or TV shows sometime in the past. But the study also showed that 83 percent of those questioned try to find the content they are looking for through above board services before trying anything else. And while the study found that 86 percent of survey takers subscribe to a streaming subscription service like Netflix, that total jumped to 91 percent among those that admit to piracy. The survey found that the top reason that users pirate is the content they were looking for wasn't legally available (34 percent) was too cumbersome or difficult to access (34 percent), or wasn't affordable (35 percent). "The entertainment industry tends to envisage piracy audiences as a criminal element, and writes them off as money lost -- but they are wrong to do so," MUSO executive Paul Briley said of the study's findings. "The reality is that the majority of people who have gone through the effort of finding and accessing such unlicensed content are, first and foremost, fans -- fans who are more often than not trying to get content legally if they can," Briley added.

Comments

Re:Funny thing

[Freischutz]

I used to (5-10 years ago) buy a lot of DVDa and Blu-Rays.

But I almost always bought them used. So no income for any movie/content companies. Oh well.

Funny thing, I don't pirate much content but what I do pirate I don't pirate because I'm a penny pinching bargain hunter. My pirating is mostly because of dumbass artificial trade barriers that result in stuff being 'unfortunately not available in my region' or because whatever I want to watch is on some TV channel that I can only get access to by subscribing to an overpriced channel package of whom all but one or two out of a hundred channels are full of garbage that does not interest me. If I could obtain the shows, movies, documentaries, standup, music, etc... via on-demand streaming services at an affordable price and I'd probably never pirate anything at all. Fortunately at least some of the streaming services seem to be figuring this out.

Re:This doesn't mean what the summary says it mean

[serviscope_minor]

Increasingly draconian DRM and punitive punishment does little to either decrease piracy or create more customers.

Precisely! Literally the only person DRM has the power to hurt is the paying customer. The preson who gets it from the Pirate Bay (or whatever the current equivalent is) gets a nice clean product by comparison. No adverts. No crappy "streaming" which keeps flipping back to 320p for no good reason, no format shifting limitations etc etc.

Piracy isn't just free, it gives a beter product.