14 DAY TRIAL // Pirates are more often than not the biggest fans of the things they're pirating, if they weren't, they wouldn't be interested in the first place. That's something that most media corporations or misguided artists miss, but it doesn't make it any less true.
More and more studies show exactly this, pirates generally tend to spend more on music, movies or whatever it is they're pirating than the people who don't pirate.
OFCOM, UK's communications regulator, a government body, published the results of a survey on piracy and the buying habits of internet users.
What it found is in line with what other similar studies uncovered. Of the 4,400 people surveyed, 16 percent had pirated something at one point.
A quarter of the pirates said they only consumed pirated content. The other three quarters also paid for some of their content, what the study categorized as "hybrids."
These hybrids make up 12 percent of the UK population, so they're a sizeable chunk. And it's these people that spend the most on entertainment and put the most value on it.
In fact, they spend, on average, three times as much than people who only buy legally.
That's true for music, movies and TV. Whether or not they would spend more or less if they couldn't get access to pirated content is a tough question.
However, while price is the biggest factor in people choosing to pirate content, 54 percent said it was one of the reasons, the fact that it's convenient was also cited by 48 percent and "quick" by 44 percent. Only a quarter said they pirated content to see if it proved worthy of buying or not.
This is hardly the first study to show this and it won't be the last. But whether it will have an impact on copyright legislation is another matter. Ostensibly, this is what OFCOM ordered it for, but lobbying bodies are powerful enough to make politicians ignore facts all too often.