The communications regulator, Ofcom UK, has just published three separate reports into the impact and scale of "illegal" copyright file sharing (piracy) by broadband ISP customers in the United Kingdom.

Under the controversial Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA), which seeks to warn and ultimately punish (e.g. disconnect) ISP customers who become "suspected" of piracy, Ofcom is required to assess the level of internet related copyright infringement.

The reports form part of this process and Ofcom will use them to help develop a "consistent and representative measurement system" for gauging the level of related activity. This includes a social study of the core motivations for such activity.

The Online Copyright Infringement Research Reports (PDF)
* Ofcom Illegal Filesharing Pilot Peer Review (Continental Research)
* Ofcom Illegal File-sharing Pilot Survey (Kantar Media)
* GfK NOP Social Research

Most of the studies gained their results through a mixture of face to face, online and telephone based questions and answers. It's crucial to state that most of the surveys are about designing an effective measure and do not include a full sample size (i.e. they're not to be considered proper studies).


None of this is to say that the sample data isn't of interest. GfK's study doesn't contain much in the way of hard statistics and only appears to have a tiny sample size, although from that it appeared to gleam that P2P File Sharing is viewed as a "mainstream activity" and one that is "strongest amongst the younger participants".

By comparison the Continental Research (CR) report found that 20.4% of Men and 13.9% of Women admitted to being "illegal downloaders". The figures increased to 38.1% of Men and 29.7% of Women when using a measure of "deduced illegal downloaders".

Apparently "deduced" in this context means somebody who has used "any of the file sharing/downloading methods" listed in Question 4 of the survey (e.g. BitTorrent, FTP, Email.. in fact pretty much the entire internet). CR admits that "not all of these downloads will be illegal".

The Kantar Media report appears to survey more than 6,000 people (both young and old) and does a much more thorough job; Kantar's conclusions projected 6.7 million ‘illegal downloaders’ in the UK (aged 12+). Films were also found to be the category that has the highest penetration of "illegal downloading".