Nearly half of Internet users in South Korea, one of the most densely wired countries in the world, illegally download a full-length movie a week, a survey released Tuesday showed.

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

The margin of error is plus or minus 2.0 percentage points. The survey found 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 talked about time flexibility.

If the 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.