News

DVD copying pretty rife

posted on 09 July 2008 08:30

DVD sales to consumers affected by piracy

About a third of PC/DVD player owners in the USA and UK make pirate copies of DVD movies according to a FutureSource survey.

FutureSource Consulting carried out a Consumer Home Piracy market research survey in the USA (sample size 3,613) and the UK (sample size (1,718). The findings, downloadable below, show:

- Around one third of all respondents in both countries admitted to making copies of pre-recorded DVDs in the last six months, including many recent blockbuster titles on DVD.
- 8-24 year old males are most likely to copy DVDs
- UK respondents showed a significant increase in copying TV shows on DVD
- If respondents had been unable to make copies of DVDs, 63% in the UK and 77% in the USA said they would have purchased all, some or at least a few of the titles.

The study states 'the number of people admitting to copying prerecorded DVDs has increased since 2007.'

It is as if owners regard posession of a DVD as a license to copy, just as they might have assumed they could have photo-copied a book if they wished. Supplying people with a product but restricting them to a license to use it but not copy it, when they have the means to copy it is, in the case of a third of customers, unrealistic.

There are two shades of criminality here. One is copying DVDs for personal use and/or gifts to friends. The other is commercial piracy which differs because the scale of license revenue evasion is much higher. The use of Digital Rights Management is an obvious way for DVD content suppliers to reduce the problem but not one that can be readily applied to the existing DVD format.

Perhaps Blu-ray content copying will be made more difficult.