According to the Observatory on Piracy and Digital Content Consumption Habits 2020 piracy in Spain was down by 10% since 2018 and 24% since 2015. The study was commissioned by Spain’s LaCoalición de Creadores e Industrias de Contenidos and prepared by GfK. However, consumption of football programming through illegal channels rose from 22% in 2019 to 23% in 2020.
For films, the industry value of stolen movies (physical and digital, including cinema) was estimated at €377 million, and the loss in profit was estimated to be €322 million. For series programming (physical and digital), the value was estimated at €563 million, with lost profit estimated at €138 million.
55% of respondents found illegal content through interactions on Facebook. More than 95% of Internet searches for illegal content was done through Google. Researchers conducted 3,022 interviews with Spanish resident Internet users, between 11 – 74 yrs old during the fouth quarter of 2020.
Quoting from the report, “Virtually all of the illegal content portals have advertising. In 2020 more than half of the internet users remember having seen advertising ofbetting websites and/or online gambling, it also increases up to 41% the online sales webs advertising, and up to 37 % for dating websites.2 out of 10 have been asked to pay to download ilegal content, being the credit card and Paypal the most used methods. 9% of the users used criptocurrency as payment method. 2 out of 10 have to fill out a survey to access the content. Half of the users remember to have seen contact information and 6 out of 10 receive more spam and advertising since they access these portals and they had an incident.”
About 80% of respondents said that site blocking was a somewhat or very effective in deterring piracy; followed by sanctions against Internet providers (70%), fining users (57%), restricting Internet access to “infractors” (54%) and awareness campaigns (54%).
Read summary by LaLiga (in English)
Read summary by LaCoalición (en Español)
Read all documents by LaCoalición (English and Spanish)
Why it matters
Consensus has emerged that site blocking is an effective countermeasure against piracy – as evidenced in this report, as well as by research – followed by site blocking legislation by four countries in South Asia.
Piracy has huge impact in Spain. The study estimated that content industries who are members of LaCoalicion employ nearly 90,000 people, and in a world without piracy, additional industry employment could exceed 21,000. Lost tax revenues were estimated at €682 million.