Here's a shocking statistic for you courtesy of research firm Futuresource Consulting: a third of all US and UK consumers have copied at least one DVD in the last 6 months. The study, which polled more that 5,000 people in both countries, attempts to paint a somewhat ugly picture of casual copyright infringement claiming that copying commercial DVDs has become so easy that this year's figure is up from about a quarter in 2007.
The average number of movies copied per respondent over the last six months equals 13 in the US and 22 in the UK, according to the report, with new releases obviously ranking as the most frequently pirated. Along with other more trivial findings Futuresource concluded that DVD revenues are declining, and though I'm actually sympathetic to intellectual property owners who are losing money to pirates, their numbers seem quite exaggerated - which perhaps should be little surprise seeing that the study was funded by Macrovision, which specializes in protecting digital content.