Small rise in online piracy in the UK

The number of British web users accessing pirated content rose slightly in the last quarter of 2012, according to a copyright infringement report published by media regulator OfCom.

The report says that 18% of UK web-users streamed or downloaded unlicensed digital media content including music, film TV, ebooks, games and other software - at least once in the three months up to the end of January 2013, with 386 million unlicensed files accessed overall. This is a small rise on the 16% accessing unlicensed digital media content in the previous quarter. About 5% of users relied more or less exclusively on illegal services and music is by far the most pirated kind of content, accounting for around 280 million of the 386 million files pirated.