Columbia University’s American Assembly research center has released a Google-commissioned survey (PDF ) on file sharing and copyright enforcement.
The survey gathered public opinions to gain insight into how consumers get content and what their opinions are toward copyright enforcement, and the results chiefly indicated that Americans do not support the use of bandwidth throttling and disconnection as fair punishments for unauthorized file sharing. Interestingly, though, 41 percent of U.S. P2P users support at least some type of penalty for unauthorized downloading.
Notably, the survey finds that U.S. peer-to-peer file-sharing users tend to purchase 30% music than non-file-sharing users. Results such as this would be of interest to Google, as it now offers the Google Play Music service and backs the open Internet cause.
