Reports

High Volume Infringers Analysis Report, Kantar Media, Commissioned by Ofcom

32% of all digital film consumed on the internet was accessed from illegal sources.
70% of music consumers indicated that they had consumed at least some tracks for free over the previous three months and 49% consumed all of it for free.
85% of those who had downloaded or streamed TV programmes in the past three months did all of it for free.

Sizing the Piracy Universe, Net Names

Absolute infringing bandwidth use increased by 159.3% between 2010 and 2012, from 3,690 petabytes to 9,567 petabytes. This figure represents 23.8% of the total bandwidth used by all internet users, residential and commercial, in the three regions studied.
327.0m unique internet users explicitly sought infringing content during January 2013. This figure increased by 9.9% in the fifteen months from November 2011 and represents 25.9% of the total internet user population in the three regions studied (i.e. 1.26 billion internet users).
13.9 billion page views were recorded on web sites focused on piracy in January 2013. This figure increased by 9.8% in the fifteen months from November 2011.

Good Money Gone Bad, Digital Citizens Alliance

the 30 largest sites that profit exclusively from advertising dollars by pushing stolen movies, music, and television programs will each make more than $4 million dollars a year for their ‘work.’
The websites researched make a projected $227 million in annual ad revenue.
Because they rely entirely on the works of others for their “product,” their profit margins range from 80% to 94%

Go legal

There are many legitimate websites where you can download films, music, games, books and other creative content legally.

The Content Map is a safe and reliable guide to legal digital services. It provides a comprehensive list of legitimate websites and, in most instances, by clicking on the website’s icon, even links you directly to the site or service.

Go to PRO-MUSIC to see the huge range of online music stores now available to make sure you’re getting your music from a legal source.

Findanyfilm.com is a great one stop shop if you’re looking for a particular film and it links to the websites where films can be downloaded or viewed legally.

Music Matters has tonnes of useful information and uses a ‘Trustmark’ to identify products and services that make music available legally.

These pages will link you through to legitimate online services where your credit card details and personal information will remain secure and your computer won’t be at risk from viruses.

Search engines don’t always make it easy for people to find the large number of legal sites that are available on the internet. More often than not pirate sites come top of the ranking lists. This is something we are campaigning on and we hope that search engines will do more to address this.