Illegal file-sharers paying most for music online

A new poll’s revealed more money is being spent on legal downloads by illicit file-sharers than law-abiding folk. According to the Digital Music Survey, fifteen per cent of the British population uses peer-to-peer software – and nine per cent will even admit to doing so in order to obtain copyrighted material they haven’t paid for. At the same time, it’s been shown that shutting down a major P2P site may only lead to a boom in alternatives as file-swappers try to fill the vacuum.

The Digital Music Survey says people who download material from the Internet illegally spend, on average, £75 each – with those on the straight and narrow forking out just £44 in comparison. Around one in ten of those surveyed between the ages of sixteen and fifty admitted to acquiring music through pirate means, with three quarters of those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four saying they’re happy to pay for songs online – at the right price. Forty-five pence was deemed to be the fair price for a track; only two per cent said they would pay a pound.

The research has been put together by Ipsos Media CT for Demos, a UK-based think tank; over a thousand people took part in the online poll behind the data. “The people who file-share are the ones who are interested in music,” said Mark Mulligan from Forrester Research. “They use file-sharing as a discovery mechanism. We have a generation of young people who don’t have any concept of music as a paid-for commodity,” he told The Independent. “You need to have it at a price point you won’t notice.”

While such figures appear to fly in the face of Government posturing on illegal downloading, it appears to be unrepentant. “The scale of unlawful file-sharing poses a real threat to the long-term sustainability of our creative industries,” a spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills told BBC News. And at least one finding does support its stance: sixty-one per cent of illegal file-swappers say they’d be deterred from doing so if threatened with being disconnected from the web for a month. “While surveys asking people about unlawful behaviour should be treated with caution, it’s encouraging that the findings signal that the three-pronged approach set out by the Government this week – a mix of education, enforcement and attractive new commercial deals – provides the best way forward for industry and consumers,” the spokesperson added.

Meanwhile, it’s been revealed that the closure of The Pirate Bay (TPB) – the world’s most notorious file-sharing site – led to a temporary three hundred per cent increase in the number of peer-to-peer websites during the summer. ISP Black Internet had been one of TPB’s main hosts until it was slapped with a court order forcing it to stop by the Swedish courts. While the site was only down for a day before finding a way back online, web security firm McAfee has linked its temporary disappearance with a boom in file-sharing sites: from under three hundred in June to around one thousand, four hundred in August. However, when it became clear TPB could return in just twenty-four hours, the trend reversed; by September there were approximately four hundred of these websites left.

“In the days prior to the shutdown, anonymisers indexed and relayed the data to users who might be blocked,” reads McAfee’s quarterly threat report. “Open-source code was available to anyone who wanted to help with redistribution of the BitTorrents. This was a true ‘cloud computing’ effort, as the masses stepped up to make this database of torrents (legal, infringed and malicious) available to others.” (McAfee’s obviously keen to point out the malware-invested nature of these TPB copycats.)

While it appears the Swedish government’s efforts to curtail piracy by targeting one major BitTorrent tracker may ultimately be doomed to failure – other sites can clearly rise up rapidly to fill the void – the evidence put forward by the Digital Music Survey suggests the UK’s own policies could be equally flawed in the long run. Even though copyright thieves may be deterred by threats of disconnection, once again the numbers suggest file-sharing is actually inflating sales. And with record numbers of singles being sold at the moment, you have to wonder whether the record companies could be shooting themselves in the foot in their crusade against P2P. With some desperate to find ways to turn a profit online (the print industry springs to mind) you have to wonder, why try and fix what isn’t broken?

Tags: BitTorrent, downloads, illega, McAfee, mp3, P2P, peer-to-peer, piracy, The Pirate Bay, torrent