Broadband News

There are around seven million people engaged in illegal file sharing in the UK and - while they may be downloading songs and movies for free - the British economy is paying the price. That's according to a new study from the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP), which estimates the cost as being in the tens of billions of pounds.

The researchers based their report on their experiences with one peer-to-peer network, which they say 1.3 million people were using one weekday; these file-sharers, they claim,  had access to material worth £12 billion. And went on to extrapolate - i.e. guesstimate - their conclusions from there. Here's an insight into their logic, straight from the SABIP report:

If each “peer” from this network (not the largest) downloaded one file per day the resulting number of downloads (music, film, television, e-books, software and games were all available) would be 4.73 billion items per year. This amounts to around £120 billion in content being consumed annually - for free.

But just think about it. Imagine you bought a DVD and let one of your mates borrow it, and he watched it and passed it on to a mate, and he passed it onto another ad infinitum then you could put a sizeable dent in the UK economy too. And it's interesting to conclude that content, if not downloaded for free, would actually have been purchased instead: is there really a "cost" to the UK economy? Who knows the damage you do when you watch a film on TV rather than buying it outright?

In its defence, SABID has stressed that its report is only preliminary and it's not particularly aggressive towards file-sharers themselves. It says illicit downloading has "become part and parcel of the social fabric of our society despite its illegal status" - and that many people involved in file-sharing don't know they're doing anything wrong. It even went so far as to claim not everyone involved in P2P networks was a student. "This report gives us some baseline evidence from which we can develop a clear research strategy to support policy development in this fast moving area," said SABIP Board member Dame Lynne Brindley.

Of course, the study has been welcomed by all the predictable people anyway. "As SABIP's report shows, illegal downloading robs our economy of millions of pounds every year and seriously damages business and innovation throughout the UK," said Intellectual Property Minister David Lammy. "It is something that needs tackling, and we are serious about doing so." But even he didn't get carried away: while it "helps put the scale of the problem into context " it also "highlights the gaps in the evidence which need to be filled."

With SABIP estimating half of all Internet traffic in Blighty revolves around illegal file swaps, some say this suggests the potential size of the downloads market rather than the scale of the problem. Among them is Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group - a UK organisation concerned about online rights and freedoms. "We need a compelling 'all you can eat' music service to reduce illicit file sharing,"  he told the BBC (again assuming the file-sharers would ever buy anything in the first place). "But [we need] to remember that extreme enforcement measures would probably be very unfair and make people angry." Better watch out, Sweden and France - the so-called “digital revolution” could one day have a whole new meaning.

[ El Reg | PA ]