Online music, TV and film piracy rises in UK

The third wave of Ofcom’s consumer tracking study into online copyright infringement – produced by Kantar Media – estimates that one in six UK internet users over the age of 12 consumed at least one item of online content illegally between November 2012 and January 2013, with one fifth of those consuming content exclusively.

The Online Copyright Infringement Tracker revealed that between November 2012 and January 2013, overall infringement rose from 16% to 18%, despite illegal music and film activity declining by 3% and 6%, respectively.

There was an increase from the second wave in the proportion of people who claimed to pay for all TV programmes consumed online in the past three months, rising from 6% to 10%.

There was also an increase in the proportion who consumed a combination of both paid and free films from 15% to 20%, with no significant changes in terms of factors that would encourage people to stop infringing – the ‘fear of getting caught’ decreased from 12% to 9% as a motivation for using paid services in favour of free ones.

Among infringers – which are more likely to be males, under 34 and ABC1s – email was the only service that showed a significant increase in use for consumption or sharing of content since the second wave (from 14% to 21%), while ITV Player fell from 25% to 21%.

The report estimates that 52 million TV programmes and 29 million films were consumed illegally during the period.

However, music downloads accounted for the greatest volume of illegal content consumed online (280 million tracks).

The most common reasons for infringing were because it is free (48%), convenient (39%) and quick (36%), with 22% of respondents saying that they’d stop infringing if everything they wanted was available legally.