Is Hulu behind the big piracy drop in the United States?

New figures released from anti-piracy group BayTSP show that the United States dropped from 1st to 4th place in 2008 in their annual list of copyright infringements by country.

The figures offered by BayTSP though don’t calculate actual piracy penetration, at least in those published at TorrentFreak (the report isn’t available on BayTSP’s site.) In the chart above, there were 8.116 million recorded infringements in the United States, but the notable thing about the list is that every other country on it has significantly smaller populations. For example, if the rate of piracy in the United States per head of population was applied to the population of Spain, the number of infringements (based as a percentage of population) would be 1.08 million vs Spain’s 24.75m. That is to say that piracy in Spain is roughly 24x more common than piracy in the United States. Per head of population, the United States wouldn’t make the top 10.

There are some problems though with the stats: we simply don’t know how these raw figures came about, so there may be a distortion in reporting, that is that piracy in Spain could be better tracked and counted vs the United States. Second: I find it difficult to believe the United States figure: was there really only 8 million downloads from a population of over 300 million?

We can though take it that the 2007 and 2008 stats were recorded the same way, so counting aside what we do know is that piracy is rapidly heading downwards in the United States. The big question is why? Why is piracy heading down at a time that the act of piracy has never been easier and more accessible?

Could it be that the 42 million videos served by Hulu in March, a number that has for the most part continued to grow over the last 12 months on a month to month basis, has a direct correlation with the decline in piracy rates in the United States?

We know it’s not the RIAA/ MPAA anti-piracy measures, with even the RIAA (mostly) giving up on taking downloaders to court. Even they could see that the strategy doesn’t work.

Instead, we have a response from big media that created supply where there was demand, supply that in part negated the need to download pirated content.

Although we’d need more quantitative data to prove a direct correlation decisively, I’m going to say Yes: Hulu is the main driver of the drop in piracy in the United States. Notably it’s not the only driver, but likewise it has driven legal content provision from the likes of CBS and other content providers as well on other sites.

That conclusion has big implications for the media industry world wide. There is now a proven way to combat piracy, but it’s one that involves the free supply of content, a model that for the most part has yet to be seriously embraced outside of the United States (there are some part exemptions, UK and Australia have some options.) Piracy is now proven in part to be driven by demand not met by legal supply, so will more companies world wide embrace the workable solution?