Posted: 07th Jul, 2011 By: MarkJ

The Cambridge-based
Envisional, which helps organisations detect and guard against the threat of
internet copyright infringement (piracy), reports that "
illegal" film piracy by broadband ISP customers in the UK has grown 30% over the past five years. In addition the
top five box office movies were pirated in the UK a total of 1.4 million times during 2010.
Report Author, Dr David Price, told the BBC Newsbeat:
"We've seen increases in technology like faster broadband. The methods of piracy have become easier, with quicker downloads and easier to find content.
We have a generation online now who aren't really bothered about downloading things illegally. Finally it's an issue of availability - there's a lot of American content which a lot of people are desperate to download that they can't get hold of legitimately."
The study found that
piracy of the top five most popular TV shows was also on the increase, recording a total of 1.24 million downloads in the UK during 2010 (33% up on the 2006 figures, when broadband was somewhat slower than today).
Interestingly Dr David Price has suggests that the most effective way of combating piracy would be for Rights Holders to release their content "
as easily and as quickly and as cheaply as possible". Easier said than done, especially when doing so for films could mean the end of traditional Cinemas'.
Meanwhile the
film industry claims to be losing £170m every year to piracy, which is also putting thousands of jobs at risk. However it's unclear whether clamping down on casual piracy would cause sales to rise, especially since somebody who downloads 100 movies would probably never have brought that many in the first place.
The UK government, Rights Holders and ISPs are currently still trying to find a universally agreeable solution to all of this. So far most of the measures have focused on punishment (website blocking, ISP disconnection, service restrictions etc.), with only a small effort going into the development of more effective business models.