How bad piracy really is in South Africa

South Africa is one of the biggest offenders of downloading and streaming pirated materials in the world, reports Torrentfreak.

This is according to piracy monitoring group MUSO’s latest Film and TV piracy insights report for 2016.

South Africa currently rates 34th worldwide, according to its piracy rate included in the report.

This piracy rate is based not only on the total illegal downloads and streams watched (in which case South Africa would be ranked much lower) but also how this percentage matches up to a countries total internet population.

That means those of us who do actually have an internet connection are much more likely to use them to help us pirate.

In fact so many South African internet users pirate, we outrank giants like the United States, India and all of Malaysia.

In absolute numbers the United States clearly comes out on top. With nearly 10 billion visits to streaming portals and over 3 billion to torrent sites, the U.S. beats all other countries.

Perhaps not a surprise, as the U.S. is one of the largest countries in the world with a high Internet penetration. Things get more interesting, however, when we look at the piracy rate based on the number of Internet users around the world.

A comparison of the top 50 countries with the most piracy traffic shows that Europe in particular has a persistent piracy problem. In fact, all of the 10 countries with the highest online piracy rates are in Europe.

Latvia comes out on top with a massive 46% of the Internet users visiting pirate sites, followed by Bulgaria, Lithuania, Croatia, Spain and Greece. The top 10 piracy havens is completed by Serbia, Ireland, Romania and Sweden.

You can check out the full list of countries below (note that the list is from least to most):