SEOUL, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- About half of Internet users in South Korea illegally download a full-length movie a week, a survey by the Korean Film Council said Tuesday.

    The survey, conducted with 2,358 on-line surfers aged from 15 to 49, shows that as many as 47.3 percent of the correspondents had downloaded feature films through file sharing sites, by paying no money or less than 100 won (0.11 U.S. dollar) per film during the past year.

    The margin of error is plus or minus 2.0 percentage points, it said.

    According the survey, a typical movie downloader has downloaded 54.5 movies per year, which means 1.1 movies per week.

    As many as 32.7 percent of illegal downloaders cited affordability as a reason for pirating movies, while 20.9 percent talked about time flexibility, it shows.

    If movie piracy is regulated more strictly, 34.3 percent said they would opt to go to movie theaters and 16.1 percent said they would subscribe to legal movie download services. However, 7.5 percent said they would still download movies illegally.

    Of those who said they have never pirated movies, 28 percent said it is complicated for them to download illegally, while 18.3 percent said they do not download as they worry about computer viruses.

    Only 12 percent said they did not want to infringe upon copyrights.