14 DAY TRIAL // Since all anti-piracy advocates continue to rage about how little people who choose to download content pay on legal alternatives, it seems appropriate for yet another study to show that pirates spend more on content than non-pirating folks.
TorrentFreak reports that a new study carried out in Australia has discovered that about 74 percent of teens between the ages of 12 and 17 abstain from pirating online content. However, they don’t buy legal content either, or at the very least, they spend a lot less money than their pirating counterparts.
Australia has been criticized over the past few years for being one of the most active countries in terms of piracy. Many have argued that if they simply stopped delaying bringing content to Australia for days, weeks and months on end, they’d probably stop pirating content since no one likes to wait that long and see the internet full of spoilers in the meantime.
Until then, however, the habit will be difficult to break. It’s not just that the number of pirates is increasing, but they’re also downloading things much more often.
The study was commissioned by the IP Awareness Foundation, an organization that includes the MPA, Foxtel and other key industry players. It finds that 29 percent of Australian adults between 18 and 64 years old pirate content on a regular or occasional basis, which is up from the 25 percent from last year.
As kids grow, they pirate more
There are also some interesting trends among the younger generation. Among the kids with ages between 12 and 13, only 14 percent pirate content, but the kids aged 14 and 15 are increasingly more active, with 29 percent of them pirating content.
However, about 35 percent of active downloaders grab a movie from the Internet once per month. At the same time, 38 percent rent movies or TV shows legally, while only 27 percent of non-pirate youngsters do this.
The entertainment industry would surely like some more parental guidance in these cases, where the adults are expected to lead the children away from pirating habits. In truth, 67 percent of respondents say it is their parents who provide the most guidance on how to behave online, while an additional 19 percent indicate towards schools and teachers instead.
While kids look up to their parents, the adults have other concerns when it comes to teaching their kids about online activity, seeing many other topics as more important than teaching them not to pirate content.
For instance, they believe it’s more important to tell them not to give credit card or bank details, not to view adult websites, to make sure they don’t release personal details online and not to download files that might contain malware.