1.3 million Brits Download Illegal Content Every Day : Report

A report published by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) posits that around seven million UK citizens download illegal content worth as much as £120 billion a year.

This sum, of course, as MCV UK rightly puts is,relies on the assumption that a person who downloads a file would have otherwise purchased it.

The organisation also reckons that the newly launched Virgin Media 50Mbps broadband connection will allow customers to download 200 MP3 files (1GB) in five minutes, the content of a DVD (4.7GB) in 3 minutes (ed: surely some mistake somewhere, must be referring to an encoded movie) and the complete digitised works of Charles Dickens in less than 10 minutes.

According to SABIP, every day 1.3 million Brits were found on file-sharing network. This has prompted Intellectual Property Minister David Lammy to declare that "This is not an issue confined by national boundaries and I am sure that other [EU] member states and their copyright industries will find this report of use in the development of policy".

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Curiously, SABIP says that free legal services like Skype or Google Maps may have encourage people to try to find ways to get things for free. Latest figures show that at least half of UK's internet traffic was illegal in nature.

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