A survey commissioned by the UK telecommunications regulator has found that only one-fifth of infringers would be put off further infringement by suspension of their Internet account.

Less drastic measures would have even less success: an ISP letter identifying infringing activity would deter only 16% of infringers, and restricting Internet access speed would deter only 14%.

Other key findings of the survey include:

• One in six (16%) UK internet users aged 12+ were estimated to have downloaded or streamed/accessed at least one item of online content illegally3 over the 3 month period May-July 2012. A quarter of these (4%) only consumed illegal content.
• Levels of infringement varied significantly by content type; our survey indicated that 8% of internet users aged 12+ consumed some music illegally over the three month period, while 6% did so for films. For video games and computer software the figure was just 2%.
• Online copyright infringers across all the content types were more likely to be male (58%), 16-34 (64%) and ABC1 (62%).