Measuring Online Copyright Infringement

Justin Le Patourel

Copyright evidence seminar, Friday 13th September 2013

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• How many?

• How much?

• Who?

• How?

• Where?

• Why?

• What impact

• How to reduce impact?

The core questions

Contents …

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• Truthfulness

• Accuracy

• Representativeness

How can you secure:

Even with the greatest care over questions and sampling, survey results must be treated with caution

Online content consumption

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Strong demand for online content: over half of internet users streamed or downloaded content during the year, spending an average of £77 each

Q1 – Q4 % 12+ internet users

Download 40%

Stream/access 49% Download/stream i.e. ‘consume’ 58%

Median no. files consumed: 60

Average spend per consumer: £77

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Base: All who accessed online content in the 12 month period

= 17% of all internet users access illegally

Infringement is a minority activity, but nearly a quarter of digital content files were accessed illegally …

29%

7.2bn files consumed; 22% illegally

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… although wide variation between content types; over a third of all films were accessed illegally but just 13% of books

36%9%

4893m

19%6%

373m

12%2%

317m

Illegal

Legal

% internet consumers% internet infringersTotal files (legal and illegal)

Volume of files

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Infringement is heavily skewed; top 10% infringers account for 74% of infringements – that’s just 2% of internet users

Concentration of infringement (all content types)

Proportion of infringers

Proportion internet users

10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

2% 3% 5% 7% 8% 10% 12% 13% 15% 17%

High volume infringement tends to be fairly category-specific

Overlap of top 20% music infringers with top 20% …

Film infringers

Software infringers

Vid game infringers

TV infringers

Top 20% music infringers

21%

4%

8%

15%

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Infringers spend more on both digital content and other content (including physical, live and merchandise) than non-infringers

Approximate annual spend on content

Spend on digital content

Spend on other content

£341

£468

£847

£538

£411

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Higher volume infringers stream and download content outside the home and using mobile and Wi-Fi networks more frequently

Outside home Wi-Fi

Mobile network (3G/4G)

Consumed

Non-infringers 10%

Infringers 18%

Top 10% 27%

Consumed

Non-infringers 21%

Infringers 30%

Top 10% 40%

Factors that would encourage infringers to stop

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What would encourage them to stop? The top five stated reasons are all about improvements to legal services

Bottom 90% Infringers

Top 10% Infringers

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Confidence in knowing what is and isn’t legal

44% not confident

34% not confident

30% not confident

30% of the top 10% of infringers claim they are not confident about what is and isn’t legal online, compared to 44% for all internet users

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Taking it forward – a wishlist

• More content types?

• Better understanding on legality issues

• Network and location of infringement

• Sanctions - what would people really do?

• Complementary research methodologies