According to data from security firm ESET, most people in Russia are no stranger to using pirated products.
The survey which was carried out in September with 2,000 participants, and reviewed by TorrentFreak, suggested that 91 percent of Russians are using pirated products.
Despite not revealing how many of the respondents are ‘dual buyers’, an omission that could prove crucial, the survey shows that games are most popular among pirates, with 52 percent admitting to cracking games.
This is followed by 43 percent who get movies and TV shows illegally, and 34 percent who get their music from unlicensed sources.
Additionally, 19 percent of respondents said they’ve previously cracked software, while 14 percent admitted to downloading ebooks from illegitimate platforms.
In other words, only the remaining 9 percent prefer sticking to exclusively legal content.
In its report, ESET suggested that 75 percent of the respondents said that high prices of legitimate products is the reason for them to pirate, with just over a third (34 percent) saying that legal services fall short of their requirements.
The report also suggested that 25 percent of the respondents refuse to pay for licensed content on “ideological” grounds, although it doesn’t elaborate on what they might be.
This is followed up by 16 percent who say they prefer pirate content because payment systems utilized by legal providers are “inconvenient”.
This survey followed a previous similar survey conducted by Irdeto in 2017, which found that most Russians didn't even realize that pirating is illegal.
On that report, 87 percent of Russian respondents didn't think that producing or sharing pirated video content is illegal, while 66 percent thought that it's perfectly fine to download or stream said content.
That's a big contrast to other global respondents, particularly in Latin America and the Asia Pacific, where 52 percent said they would stop watching pirated content after finding out that doing so would make studios to lose cash.
In 2013, it was predicted that Russia made American entertainment software manufacturers lose $223 million a year and business software makers almost $300 million. At that time, The Business Software Alliance estimated that the worldwide revenue losses to the software industry from piracy at $11.4 billion.
What this means, ESET's findings aren’t surprising.
But what should be noted is that, major countries around the world, including Russia, have problems with privacy. The governments in those countries are constantly trying to address this problem.
In Russia, the government has already developed one of the most aggressive internet firewall the world has ever seen. Taking cues from China's Great Firewall, internet contents in Russia are heavily filtered.
The Russian government is also working to further legislative amendments that aims to compel search engines to query online databases to ensure that links to allegedly-infringing content are removed from indexes in a matter of minutes.