Who cares about copyright?

WASHINGTON: A massive music-industry campaign to change public attitudes over the past three years about copying music over the Internet has had little effect on Internet users, according to a survey.

Two-thirds of U.S. residents who copy digital music online say they do not care if that music is copyrighted, up from 61 percent three years ago, the nonprofit Pew Internet and American Life Project found. The recording industry has launched an aggressive legal and publicity campaign against unauthorized song downloading. Prominent music stars have spoken out against the practice, while the industry has filed lawsuits against Napster, Kazaa and other "peer to peer" software providers that allow users to copy songs directly from each others' hard drives.

But only 27 percent of the 1,500 Internet users polled between March and May of this year said they cared whether the music they downloaded was copyrighted or not, the study found.

"Americans' attitude toward copyrighted material online has remained dismissive, even amidst a torrent of media coverage and legal cases aimed at educating the public about the threat file-sharing poses to the intellectual property industries," the report said.

The Recording Industry Association of America downplayed the survey's findings, saying that Internet users were polled before the industry announced it would take song-swappers to court. Two-thirds of young Internet users polled by Forrester Research said the threat of jail or fines would stop them from downloading, a spokesperson said.

"We believe the most powerful deterrent is the message that uploading or downloading copyrighted works without permission is against the law," the spokesperson said. The Pew survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

© Reuters