NEW DELHI: Content piracy is not declining and is still a very serious ongoing threat to copyright owners, according to findings from Rightscorp, a provider of monetisation services for artists and holders of copyrighted intellectual property (IP).

Rightscorp CEO Christopher Sabec, and president and chief operating officer Robert Steele presented key market findings at the 5th Annual Content Protection Summit 2014 during a discussion that tackled the issue of whether piracy is on the decline titled, 'Is The Piracy Threat Decreasing? What Content Owners Need To Know Now'.

The discussion presented an overview of the landscape of piracy from a past, present and future perspective. In the presentation, Sabec and Steele highlighted that in the United States, peer-to-peer file sharing grew 18 per cent from 2010 to 2013 on a data traffic basis.

Estimates show that over 2 billion units of movies were shared in 2013. Rightscorp estimated that music consumption on file sharing networks grew from 2.7 billion digital songs in 2010 to 8.3 billion digital songs shared in 2013.

Rightscorp also estimated that approximately 74 per cent of digital music was consumed on file sharing networks in 2013 without compensation to the copyright owners. In addition, the presentation forecast a 40 per cent increase in peer-to-peer file sharing by 2018, which includes 11.9 billion songs and over 3 billion movies illegally downloaded. Rightscorp's estimates were based on source data from Cisco, Envisional, and Netnames.

"We have heard many people state that they believed that piracy was decreasing in the United States. We have now presented our analysis that piracy has only increased across every industry since 2010," stated Steele.