New Survey Finds P2P Pirates Buy More Music

A new survey commissioned by Google titled Copy Culture has found that people who use peer-to-peer file sharing software are more likely to purchase music.

The public opinion survey comes from Columbia University’s research center American Assembly and was conducted by researchers Lennart Renkema and Joe Karaganis.

As reported by tech blog Ars Technica, Renkema and Karaganis discovered that US P2P file sharers legally consume approximately 30% more digital music than those who do not file share, and are more willing to pay slightly higher prices on those purchases.

P2P file sharers, in particular, are heavy legal media consumers. They buy as many legal DVDs, CDs, and subscription media services as their non-file-sharing, Internet-using counterparts. In the US, they buy roughly 30% more digital music. They also display marginally higher willingness to pay. – Copy Culture

As noted by NME, Renkema and Karaganis also found that 80% of US citizens agree it is morally acceptable to share copyrighted material with family members, while 60% are willing to do the same with friends.

Other findings of the Copy Culture survey, which also studied German file-sharing patterns, include:

• Nearly half the population in the US and Germany (46% US; 45% DE) has copied, shared, or “downloaded for free” music, movies, and TV shows. We call this “copy culture.”

• In both countries offline “private copying” — copying for personal use or sharing with family and friends — is comparable in scale to online file sharing.

• Copying and online file sharing are mostly complementary to legal acquisition, not strong substitutes for it.

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