Despite the growing availability of legal options, online piracy remains rampant. Every day pirate sites are visited hundreds of millions of times. Piracy tracking outfit MUSO has documented the piracy landscape with data from tens of thousands of the largest global piracy sites.
In its latest report, the company recorded more than 300 billion visits to pirate sites last year alone. This is an increase of 1.6 percent compared to 2016. More than half of all these visits (53%) are going to streaming sites, making that the most popular piracy tool. Torrent sites and direct download portals still have a significant user base, but follow at a respectable distance.
Most of the pirate visits came from the United States, followed by India and Brazil. Despite the various pirate site blockades, the UK also secured a spot in the top ten, ranked at the bottom with nine billion visits.
Comments
Frank March 26, 2018 um 3:06 pm
The report noted that in January 2017 MUSO tracked 1.43 billion visits to stream ripping sites; by December, that number dropped to 647.83 million, so more people are using regular streaming (either paid or supported by ads) sites. So that is a positive development for the music industry at least.
MUSO is angling to pick up more clients.
Fbone March 26, 2018 um 7:43 pm
If I understand correctly, the report said most people pirate TV shows. If so, then this wouldn’t affect music and box office sales. However, fewer people are watching traditional TV especially the 18-24 year old group. Whether they are pirating shows instead and thus not counted by Nielsen is the question. I remember reports saying GOT was the most pirated entity in history.
Marilynn Byerly March 27, 2018 um 12:16 pm
Since this is a site about books, let’s see how piracy affects authors and publishers. Unlike music, books, particularly novels, are once and done experiences so authors/publishers will see no income from a pirated book. Unlike movies and tv, there is no difference between the experience of a pirated and legal ebook so there is no special reason to buy a legal book. Since all of an author’s back and front list will be loaded to a pirate site, there will be no reason for the illegal user to buy any of the author’s books so there will be no creation of paying fans.
So, pirate sites=totally screwed authors and publisher with lost income, and pirate sites=pirates walking away with all the profit.
As an aside, I know lots of authors and a few small publishers who use MUSO, and it does a good job of finding pirated books so it is a good product.
If having your books uploaded to pirate sites p*sses you off, I recommend you join AuthorsAgainstE-BookTheft which is on yahoogroups.com.
Disgusting Dude March 27, 2018 um 5:56 pm
There are big differences between video piracy and book piracy.
The biggest is videos take much longer to download and thus are pirated piecemeal. That is why so much pirate activity has switched to streaming.
Books on the other hand can be downloaded in a Yify so they can and on are download in batches of thousands. One quick torrent download can bring more books than a human can ever read.
As a result videos are typically download for immediate consumption whereas books are downloaded for hoarding. Often by people that will never read them and would never would buy them anyway.
This has long been a matter of record.
Nate Hoffelder March 27, 2018 um 6:31 pm
which is why most book piracy doesn’t matter
Allen F March 27, 2018 um 7:26 pm
As I posted elsewhere:
Same old same old. Make it hard or expensive or annoying to do the legal way and people will find another path.
Hard – not shown in a format you can watch it in without jumping through hoops (like US only games/DVDs/TV shows)
Expensive – overpriced ebooks come to mind, or having to subscribe to Disney/ESPN to watch one single show.
Annoying – 12-14 minutes of loud ads on the 30 minute judge show me mum likes to watch.
I myself don’t bother with piracy, there’s more than enough free/cheap/easy access stuff out there to read/watch/hear to last me several lifetimes. My own random ramblings of stories are on Amazon, but they’re also out there to read for free, I just ask that others don’t try to sell them as their own work (happily no one has wanted to be considered as nutty as I must be to write what I do. ? )