The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) has published the results of its large p2p study based on an online poll of over 6,000 participants. The results show that the new stricter Finnish copyright law enabled year 2006 (coined as Lex Karpela according to Tanja Karpela who was the Minister of Culture at the time) has had only a minimal effect on filesharers. Only 10% of P2P users reported that the new copyright law had at least somewhat decreased their P2P usage. People know that filesharing of music and videos is not legal but they simply choose to ignore the law. One reason for the ignorance was the perceived miniscule risk of getting caught.

The study confirms the popularity of filesharing in Finland. 87% of study participants had used filesharing sites, 77% reported having downloaded content illegally, 59% sharing it illegally and 9% had acted as the intitial source for some content. Half of the survey respondents shared or downloaded files at least once a week, and the most common answer regarding the amount of downloaded files was over 100 albums (over 1000 files) of downloaded music and over 200 movies or episodes of TV series.

The study also showed that entertainment industry's antipiracy campaigns have been utterly ineffective among filesharers. Respondents generally considered copyright industry's arguments dubious.

The participants indicated a surprisingly wide (80%) interest in broadband tax type solutions where filesharing would be legalized with a monthly fee. Over half of the respondents were ready to support such a scheme but only on strict condition that all shared material would remain DRM free just as it is now on p2p networks.