As global streamer Netflix gears up to battle login sharing, the Australian government has quietly recast its piracy survey to define that activity as unlawful for the purposes of statistics collection.
The change is contained in the publication of the Consumer Survey on Online Copyright Infringement 2022-2023 [pdf].
The survey claimed that 39 percent of people surveyed for the 2022-2023 report had “consumed content online in at least one content category in ways that were likely to be unlawful”, compared to 30 percent in the 2021 survey.
Since the previous survey, the definition of unlawful behaviour was expanded to “paying a small fee to access one or many subscription services through a shared / unknown account (for example, shared login credentials)”.
The report noted that login sharing is included among “new potentially unlawful consumption methods”.
It states that the observed growth in unlawful access to content year-on-year could be due to the change in methodology.
“In this instance, it is likely that providing respondents with additional unlawful response options to choose from may have contributed to an increase in the estimated rates of infringement,” the report states.
“It may also be in part due to the increased ability of the survey to detect unlawful behaviours in 2022, rather than an increase in the incidence of unlawful behaviours per se.”
If credential-sharing is excluded from the measurement, the number of respondents to consume content in a potentially unlawful way is 35 percent; four percent of respondents were caught solely because they fell under the definition of credential sharing.
The report coincides with a consultation into a copyright enforcement review that closes March 7, as well as the broader Netflix crackdown.
The new definition also considerably expanded how much streaming was considered unlawful, up from 24 percent in the past two surveys to 33 percent in 2022-2023.
Netflix’s hope is to introduce a small extra charge on an account if it detects that the account has been shared beyond a household.