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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Bobbie Johnson, San Francisco

Survey: 43% of Britons never pay for digital content

Another week, another survey on British attitudes towards filesharing: it's not clear that the constant stream of these stories will ever cease, but the latest effort - commissioned by networking technology group Telindus - does at least have a few interesting numbers in it.

According to the survey of 2,000 adults surveyed online (therefore potentially skewing the results a little), 43% of respondents said they never paid for digital media - regardless of whether they should or not. Half of men, apparently, said they were dedicated pirates - despite 59% of respondents saying that they were aware that sharing or downloading unauthorised content was illegal.

There have been plenty of studies exploring this sort of thing before - earlier this week a survey suggested teenagers were turning to streaming instead of downloading - but there is one really intriguing bit of information hidden away in the latest survey: nearly one in five people surveyed believed that material was effectively in the public domain once it had been posted online - and that they effectively gave up ownership of material when they posted it to sites like Facebook and MySpace.

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