Survey shows actually yes, you would download a car
In the mid-2000s, the movie industry sponsored a series of ads that equated illegally downloading a movie to committing a series of badly-shot crimes out of a low-budget Oceans movie. It was supposed to burn into the collective psyche that downloading a movie is BAD and ILLEGAL and you’ll probably end up in jail with an implausibly bad haircut.
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Well, the moral panic seems to have worked about as well as all the other movie industry attempts to curb piracy. A new survey from anti-piracy firm Irdeto has found that 32 percent of adult Americans admit to pirating content. Presumably, the other 68 percent are lying, or grandparents.
Irdeto’s survey was conducted by respected polling firm YouGov, and surveyed over 1,000 adults over a week-long period. Polling for illegal behaviour is always difficult, so the 32 percent statistic probably represents a lower band, as all the people worried about Homeland Security surveillance probably didn’t tick yes.
That said, for an online survey, people are surprisingly candid about their lack of scruples. The survey showed that “when told that pirated video content can result in studios losing money, meaning they cannot invest in creating content, 39% of consumers said that this knowledge has no effect on the amount of pirated video content they want to watch.”
One glimmer of hope from Netflix out of all this: while the vast majority of people were interested in pirating TV shows, movies, and live sports, only 9 percent were interested in pirating original content from Netflix or Hulu. This reinforces the long-standing assumption that people are willing to pay a small amount for content, if it’s easily accessible.
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