The changing nature of content piracy - Rapidshare, Megaupload et al

I was very interested to see a new study from MarkMonitor reported on the BBC which highlighted the growing use of cyberlocker sites like Megaupload and Rapidshare to host pirated content.

At Harris Interactive, we've been tracking the use of such sites in the UK over the last 2 years to pirate music, movies and video games. Our recent work for the BPI (see here for the press release and here for the BPI's report) also included a very robust volumetric analysis of music piracy by source in 2010.

We can see that p2p remains the #1 source for music piracy but more than half of all music piracy is via sources other than p2p, and these are likely growing, as indicated strongly by the MarkMonitor study. It only takes a quick Google search to find all this stuff, it's ridiculously accessible and more and more people are taking advantage of it. The BPI's full report has a great deal more data on UK music piracy and how the music industry is responding with truly innovative digital initiatives, like Spotify, to persuade users towards legal channels.