A major new survey of American attitudes to online copyright infringement has found that 70 percent of all 18 to 29-year-olds have pirated music, TV shows, or movies. But almost no Americans are hardcore grog-swillers, and two-thirds of those who do acquire copyrighted material without permission also acquire content legally.

The new research comes courtesy of a forthcoming report called Copy Culture in the US and Germany, and it was done by some of the same researchers who worked on the groundbreaking Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report earlier this year. Data comes from a Princeton Survey Research Associates telephone poll of 2,303 American adults during the month of August; a Google grant funded some of the research.

The poll found that 46 percent of all Americans have engaged in piracy, but that young people skew the numbers significantly. And while it found that piracy is common, it also found that most is relatively casual. Only 2 percent of Americans are “heavy music pirates” with more than 1,000 tracks of infringing music; only 1 percent of Americans are heavy TV/movie pirates with more than 100 infringing shows or films.

For most people, downloading music and video goes hand-in-hand with acquiring it legally; less than one-third of admitted pirates copped to owning an entire collection of illicit material. And large numbers of pirates have already altered their behavior in response to more attractive legal services for acquiring content.

When it comes to music, 46 percent of American pirates said that they grab unauthorized music less than they used to thanks to legal streaming services (and the survey was done before Spotify launched in the US). For video, 40 percent of pirates have already curtailed their activity thanks to legal alternatives like Netflix.

As for video game pirates, they're negligible. Only 3 percent of homes with game consoles have machines modified to accept pirated discs.

The takeaway: Americans pirate, but few are engaged in some kind of principled War Against Copyright. Most just want easy access to legal material and are willing to pay reasonable fees to get it (see the success of iTunes, Netflix, and the Kindle for examples of this in action). Indeed, only 16 percent of Americans believe that it's acceptable to upload pirated content to sites where anyone can download it, only 8 percent say posting pirated content to Facebook would be acceptable, and only 6 percent think selling copies of pirated content is okay.

Oh—and piracy isn't gendered. The survey found that “men outpolled women by 2 percent or less” when it came to piratical behavior.