In news that’s sure to shiver nobody’s timbers, it turns out Australians are a bunch of scurvy, bilge-sucking, pillaging pirates when it comes to illegal downloads.
We’ve all heard it said before – that those scallywags Down Under are the worst in the world when it comes to downloading TV shows like Game Of Thrones, but now there’s new research that proves just how much we love sailing the torrents.
A new government study reveals that more than twice the amount of Aussies are leeching illegal content than those in the UK.
43% of the 2,630 Australians surveyed in the study admitted to illegally downloading content. That’s compared to 21% of Brits surveyed for the same period (March and April).
While it could be put down to the fact that we Aussies are just more honest about our torrenting habits than those shifty characters in the motherland, it’s still a pretty big margin to be beating them by. And not in a good, The-Ashes kind of way.
The government has also crunched the data into some handy graphs for us to see the extent of our digital skullduggery.
Probing into our motivations for illegally downloading, the majority of people cited, kind of obviously, because “it is free”.
And, finally, they also asked people what would encourage them to stop infringing. Interestingly, the majority cited making content cheaper, making it more available and making it available as soon as it’s released overseas, rather than being threatened with punishments if they do dare to download.
Hope you’re paying attention, Attorney General George Brandis.
Also interestingly, the study also found that around half of us are a bit confused about what does and doesn’t actually constitute illegal downloading.
This is the day you will always remember as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow on Netflix, but ended up illegally downloading the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie instead because it wasn’t available in Australia yet.
