Despite having an abundance of content options such as
Netflix and Spotify, online users in Singapore are the ninth worst
Internet pirates in the world, a report has found.
London-based tech firm Muso found that each Internet
user here visited piracy sites 180 times last year, on average.
Singapore is the only non-European country in the top
10 list. Belarus is the most rampant in accessing illegal content,
with each user visiting such sites 284 times, followed by Lithuania
(269) and Georgia (243).
The ranking is based on the number of visits to piracy
sites as a ratio to the country’s Internet-user population. Data
was culled from more than 23,000 of the highest traffic sites
globally, covering over 200 million devices, including desktops and
mobile devices, from more than 220 countries.
Forms of online piracy covered include Web streaming,
Web downloads, public and private torrents, and stream ripping.
Streaming formed the lion’s share of illegal access to
content, followed by public torrent sites and Web download.
Muso — which deals in anti-piracy solutions for the
film, TV, music and publishing industries — tracked 191 billion
visits to piracy sites overall last year, which translates to
around 53 visits per internet user.
These figures do not include data from China, Taiwan,
Japan, South Korea, and North Korea because the firm’s domain
coverage for these locations was not complete during the period of
the study, Muso said.
In terms of absolute numbers, the United States is top,
accounting for 20 billion visits to piracy sites, the Muso report
stated. However, this translates to just nearly 71 visits per
Internet user there.
Back in 2015, a survey commissioned by the Intellectual
Property Office of Singapore found that fewer people here consider
it a crime to download online content from illegal sources or
engage in unauthorised file sharing, compared with four years
earlier.
About one in two respondents, or 54.9 per cent, viewed
downloading from unauthorised sources as theft, down from some
three in four (or 77.8 per cent) in 2010.
Common reasons for online intellectual property rights
infringements cited by respondents in that survey include
convenience and unwillingness to pay for content.
Intellectual property experts interviewed by TODAY
raised some factors that could have affected the results in the
Muso report.
Mr Bryan Tan, from law firm Pinsent Masons, said that
Internet users from some countries could have used virtual private
network, or VPN, to access illegal content, but are not being
tracked or are wrongly tracked by Muso.
Likewise, the data was also taken from more than 23,000
of the highest-traffic sites, which are likely to contain English
material and could have excluded data from sites in other
languages, for instance.
Mr Tan noted that some of the illegal sites contain
content, such as Asian films and shows, which are not as widely
distributed and accessible to people. This may explain why online
users go to these sites despite having legitimate content options
such as Netflix and Spotify.
Mr Jason Chan, director of Amica Law, said that the
exclusion of some countries could also affect the results because
they have high Internet access as well.
He would not be too alarmed at the findings because the
results do not show enough to determine if Singapore is a nation of
pirates. “We have the legal measures in place, I think we have done
all that can be reasonably expected,” Mr Chan said.
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