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Google-commissioned survey: US P2P users buy 30 percent more music

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Columbia University’s American Assembly research center is out with a new survey (PDF) commissioned by Google 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.

The findings most notably mentioned, however, that U.S. peer-to-peer file-sharing users tend to purchase 30 percent more music than non-filing-sharing users. Google would be interested in such results because it now offers the Google Music service through Google Play and often touts the open Internet cause.

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Like Google, Apple would also find the results interesting. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has dominated the music-buying scene with iTunes for over a decade—even though Beats founder Jimmy Iovine wants it to go the music subscription route and Amazon is worming in with its newly Safari-optimized MP3 store.

Get the survey’s full breakdown at 9to5Google.

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