A survey published today reveals British people are more likely to copy pre-recorded DVDs than Americans. That may be surprising, but it’s by far the most plausible of the claims the survey makes.

If the study is to be believed, 36% of Brits and 32% of Americans have copied a pre-recorded DVD in the past six months. That raises alarm bells straight away – after all, do a third of people you know even have the technical knowledge to copy a DVD, let alone actually do it?

There’s clearly something odd going on here, and the big clue is that the survey was sponsored by Macrovision, the company which licences the most common form of anti-piracy technology.

The study results (PDF link) claim that DVD piracy is causing serious financial damage to the movie industry. The results show 63% of British respondents and 77% of American participants say they would have bought some of the discs legitimately, and more than a quarter would have bought all of them.

In the US, more than half those who’d copied discs said they’d successfully copied at least one recent ‘blockbuster’ movie (as in a big seller rather than the video chain). And across the two countries, the average copier had pirated a dozen different discs in the past six months.

Of course, nobody is suggesting the researchers have made up the figures here. But the results seem so far-fetched that it does make you wonder how representative the study group was and whether the questions were worded in a leading manner. The wording of the summary report suggests the figures don’t include downloaded material, which would have been about the only way they’d sound credible.

The same group carried out a similar study last year and it appears piracy is on the up. That may well be true, and the study hints that this could be down to an increase in people joining online DVD rental sites and ripping discs to their hard drive to watch later so that they can send discs back right away and get a new title.

The strangest thing about the whole affair is that Macrovision’s PR staff thinks the survey shows the need for their services. That’s certainly one argument, but another would be that the survey shows their technology can’t be that great if a third of people have beaten it.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 4:54 pm under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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