Who Leads The World In Illegal Downloads?

[HolyMoly]

Hong Kong music fans are world leaders when it comes to downloading illegal files - pulling more than a billion Hong Kong dollars ($167 million) worth of songs off the internet, a survey showed.

In the past two and a half years, Hong Kong web surfers have downloaded at least 130 million songs onto their PCs, along with millions of dollars worth of software programmes, showed the poll by TNS, a global market research company.

"Downloading illegally is not a niche activity anymore, it's a mainstream activity," said TNS director Steven Yap on Thursday. "We believe this is the highest in the world."

The survey of 500 computer users in the former British colony found almost half, 48 per cent, had downloaded at least one song.

Within the high-profile 15-24 age group, however, that figure balloons to 81 per cent, a fifth of whom had downloaded more than 250 songs.

A Hong Kong government-commissioned survey released at the same time ironically revealed growing awareness of what it meant to infringe intellectual property rights and even concluded that more than 90 per cent of respondents felt the problem deserved action.

"We are seeing a situation where young people are growing up expecting to be able to get there digital products for free off the internet - they now see music procurement as something that is done for free," said Mr Yap.

Mr Yap said the TNS survey results were comparable with similar figures seen in the US and Europe.

Hong Kong's high rate of illegal downloading - usually through file-sharing programmes such as Kazaa or Limewire - is due mostly to the high penetration of fast-speed broadband internet connection networks, the survey authors believe.

Hong Kong, along with South Korea, has the world's highest penetration of broadband service provision - around 70 per cent of all internet users.

"Broadband has only been widely available for about two and half years," said Mr Yap. "Before that downloading large files was slow and tedious - so all this activity has happened in the past two and a half years."

Another factor in the mushrooming of illegal downloading was a pervasive culture of piracy in a city close to China's southern industrial heartland, long regarded as the world's intellectual property rights infringement blackspot.

"Hong Kong for some time has been accustomed to acquiring its commercial digital products for free," Mr Yap said. "The internet has replaced fly-by-night high-street stores as the most popular place to obtain pirated music and software."

This posed greater difficulties to manufacturers and authorities as they try to crack down on the illicit trade, he concluded.

"The imperative of the providers of digital products is that much more urgent," Mr Yap said.

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0...Enbv%5E,00.html

edit - I just changed the header info - CP

[DudeAsInCool]

I would have thought counterfeit cd's would have been more prevalent than digital downloads. I guess the world is changing and changing fast