世論 What Japan Thinks

Yet another survey on illegal downloads, this time from iShare, pussy-foots around the direct question of whether people have downloaded or not, although there are some interesting answers in the survey, for some reason entitled “the morals of young people“, suggesting there were a number of other unreported questions asked.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 9th of March 2010 834 people from the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 64.1% of the sample were male, 11.4% in their teens, and 88.4% in their twenties. This is quite an unusual survey demographic for iShare.

To educate the public, there has been a site set up to educate the public on the recent change in the law. The site is called in Japanese やめよう！違法ダウンロード, yameyou! Ihou download, Stop! Illegal Download, and can be found at the rather quaint URL http://www.happy-musiccycle.jp/.

The change in the law this January has outlawed download – up to then it was only illegal to upload; downloading was fine, even through P2P software, as long as you set it to leech mode only. The site has a FAQ with the answer to a few questions, including one interesting one that says it is still legal to burn a CD and give it to your mother. I would guess that CD rental shops fall under this clause so you are still free to rent’n'rip.
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As I read mostly English-language web sites and having heard stories such as 40% of US purchases being bigital, when I came across this survey from Media Interactive, reported on by japan.internet.com, into music, I was quite surprised to see the data for Japan, especially since this is an internet-based sample that would be expected to have a bias towards online shopping.

Demographics

Over the 1st and 2nd of March 2010 exactly 1,000 regular music listeners completed an internet-based questionnaire. 50.6% of the sample were male, 0.3% in their teens, 15.8% in their twenties, 30.7% in their thirties, 28.9% in their forties, 16.2% in their fifties, and 8.1% in their sixties.

In Q3 I’m quite surprised that radio is grouped into the “other” category, and although streaming sites seem to be popular in the UK and the USA, they don’t get a mention here – do they in fact exist in Japan? Additionally, the number of freetards seems comparatively rather low.
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I’m back from holidays, so normal service will be resumed from today. To kick things off, here’s one from JR Tokai Express Research Inc and published by japan.internet.com looking into P2P (peer to peer) file-sharing software.

Demographics

On the 29th of July 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel employed in public or private industry completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 73.6% of the sample were male, 8.8% in their twenties, 36.4% in their thirties, 41.2% in their forties, and 13.6% in their fifties. The Japanese text said in one place it was only those in private industry interviewed, but in another that it was both public and private; and in one place people from their twenties to sixties, but the percentage breakdown did not mention anything about people in their sixties…

In Q2, one category that is omitted is legitimate software, either shareware or Linux and other GPLed contents.

My fingers are still jet-lagged, so I cannot type too much extra comment tonight…
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Perhaps it’s just the types of web sites I frequent (Slashdot and digg, for instance), or perhaps it’s just that people are reluctant to admit to filesharing even semi-anonymously, but this recent survey conducted by goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com into movie watching showed P2P the second least-popular way for obtaining movies.

Demographics

Between the 14th and 16th of May 2008 1,087 members of the goo Research online monitor pool completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.4% of the sample was male, 12.1% were in their teens, 22.1% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, and 28.0% aged fifty or older.

“Better than free” is the basic strategy pursued by many paid services that compete with pirated content. Apple’s iTunes, in particular, mostly achieves this goal, but other systems I have used, especially from large Japanese corporates, are nowhere near realising this. I’ve not personally used any of these mail-order DVD rental systems, as most of my film needs are met by either the cinema or stuff recorded off cable.

I’m not sure why video tape-only people were eliminated from Q2, and finding out the patterns of usage of tape and DVD (and hard disk, for that matter) would have been interesting. Perhaps if one pays to obtain the full results one can learn these details. I’m also a little surprised that Video On Demand and acTVila were not distinct answers for Q2.
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It’s been a while since I last looked at P2P (Peer-to-Peer) software; although it is still a big issue in Europe and the USA with many organised piracy rings and individuals getting their collars felt for illegal file-sharing, what is the current situation in Japan, where government workers seem to have perfected the fine art of losing secret information through ill-configured file-sharing software? To find out some of the answers, japan.internet.com presented the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into the use of Winny and other P2P filesharing software.

Demographics

On the 13th of November 2007 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research Inc’s online monitor pool employed in the private or public sector successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 7.9% of the sample were in their twenties, 40.0% in their thirties, 34.8% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 4.5% in their sixties. The split of the sexes is not reported, but recent surveys by JR Tokai Express Research with samples taken from employed people have had around 82% male and 18% female respondents.

In Q1SQ3, I don’t know if the worry about infringing copyright is from the point of view of not wanting to deprive artists, or if it is due to a fear of being caught doing it, although the wording suggests its the stealing aspect that was considered when answering, not the subsequent chance of being arrested for possession.

In addition, only 3.4% complained about their connection speed, because as another recent survey shows, the vast majority of Japanese have fat pipes.
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With stories about the dangers of Winny flying around, japan.internet.com jumped on the bandwagon (see my previous stories on Winny usage and the greatest security threats of 2005), publishing a survey carried out in conjuction with goo Research to find out about people’s use of file sharing software. They interviewed 1,071 people from their internet monitor group. 41.6% of the respondents were male, 23.2% in their twenties, 44.1% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, and 7.5% in their fifties.

This survey talks about confidential data leakage due to Winny viruses, but I have not seen any information that confirms it is due to viruses, and not just down to people sharing their whole hard disk or the like.

I did once or twice use Winny, but gave up as first the download rate was unbelievably slow, second the selection of material was pretty poor (or my understanding of Japanese was), and third it was, as is much Japanese user interface design, incredibly cluttered and unintuitive for me to use.
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In the middle of March this year iShare surveyed the users of their CLUB BBQ mail forwarding service to see what they thought about file-sharing (or P2P) software. They got replies from 783 people, 74% male, but no age breakdown is available.

The most (in)famous P2P program in Japan is Winny, which has been responsible for rather a few data leaks. To be strictly correct, however, the software is not responsible, it’s the user for not knowing how to set it up correctly that’s the problem, along with lax security that allows people to install dodgy software on work computers, or to place confidential information on their home PCs. See also my other recent article that ranks it as the second greatest threat of 2005!

Note that since people are being asked to describe how they may be breaking the law, there might be some degree of reluctance for people to answer truthfully, so perhaps the true rate of file-sharing within this survey group is higher than reported. Note also that the population that has been surveyed here is perhaps a bit heavy on otaku.

Finally, BitTorrent is P2P but has a decent number of legitimate uses – how did that affect the results obtained? Is it even well-known in Japan?

UPDATE: translated and published another file sharing software use poll.
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