Seven million UK thieves

2

The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) commissioned new research that has 7 million people in the UK stealing content online.

Researchers discovered 1.3 million people using one file sharing network on one weekday alone. They think that over a year they had free access to stolen material worth £120 billion.

We are experiencing the biggest glut of stealing in the history of mankind. As we move to a knowledge based economy we must protect people’s work from theft, otherwise it will not be worth creating these products and the development of mankind as a whole will be held back.

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2 Comments


  1. Let’s turn London into a prison camp! I think at this point, adding a ISP surcharge is going to be the only way forward – trying to make criminals of 7m people is not really practical…


  2. According to the IFPI (http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/DMR2009.pdf), in the UK “110 million single tracks were downloaded in 2008, up 42 per cent on 2007. Digital album sales also rose sharply, by 65 per
    cent to 10.3 million now accounting for
    7.7 per cent of the albums market (OCC/
    BPI).”

    So, let’s see some rough calculations, assuming (in US$) $1/track and $10/album: 110M tracks x $1 = $110M; 10.3M albums x $10 = $103M, total = $213M; If 10.3M is 7.7% then the total albums sold were 134M, or about $1.34B, or about 820 million pounds.

    They’re saying they lost £120 billion? 146 TIMES what they actually sold? They’re saying that 1.3 million people would have spent each 92,000 pounds on music?

    I call shenanigans!

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