Until now the brunt of on-line copyright theft has fallen onto
the music industry, which has seen revenue fall as fans take
advantage of peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa to swap and
download music for free.
The survey of 3,600 broadband internet users by research firm
OTX also found that over half of those who have downloaded a film
illegally plan to do so again, after canvassing the views of users
in the UK, US, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and
Korea.
Twenty percent of users in the UK and 10% of those in Japan
admitted downloading films illegally. South Korea had the worst
record, with over 50% of respondents admitting that they had
watched pirated movies.
According to the survey, of those who had downloaded movies, 17%
were not going to the cinema as often, while 26% were buying fewer
DVDs.
"It's not hard to imagine as other countries become increasingly
broadband-based we'll see more of this happen," Matthew Grossman, a
spokesman for the MPAA, told CNET News.com.
Another survey, due to be published today by the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), backs up the
findings. According to the Washington Post, the survey shows that
the illegal file-sharing of music over the internet has been
overtaken by the swapping of films and other non-music files for
the first time.
Twenty-seven percent of files downloaded were video, rather than
music – up from 25.2% last year, says the Washington Post. Most
swaps, however, relate to neither music nor video files, but 'other
files' – such as pornographic images and software, according to the
newspaper's web site.
