Are we a nation of thieves? These new numbers, published by BBC news, put the US at the top of the list for illegal download, and by far! Here are the numbers for the first six months of this year:
US – 96,681,133 downloads
UK – 43,263,582 downloads
Italy – 33,158,943 downloads
Canada – 23,959,924 downloads
Brazil – 19,724,522 downloads
It was the biggest analysis of this kind to be conducted, just based on BitTorrent files activity.
The study otherwise concentrates on the UK, and put Manchester on the map as the capital of piracy in the UK,… isn’t the city well known for her music scene? I guess it goes with it. Actually, English people are really the worst thieves in the story, when we compare both populations – 62 million for the UK, 311 million for the US! They are a fifth of us, and have downloaded almost half of what we have!
More than 33 million albums and 10 million singles were downloaded illegally this year… And which album was the most pirated in the world? Rihanna’s latest ‘Talk That Talk’ with 1,228,313 downloads in 2012! Drake was number one in the States, with his single ‘The Motto’ downloaded almost half a million times.
It looks like people who are fighting against illegal downloads have already lost the battle. Even in France, where the controversial anti-piracy Hadopi law (law promoting the distribution and protection of creative works on the internet) has been enacted 2 years ago, new music sales revenues have still been going downhill, by 3.9 % over 2011. Illegal downloading is here to stay, whatever you think about it.