Blocking Pirate Sites Does Nothing to Stop Piracy

Has Big Media learned nothing from the War on Drugs? Try as it might, the law can't seem to stop people from enjoying the finer things in life. Like marijuana. Or BitTorrents. But that doesn't stop it from trying.

Last spring, two court rulings in the Netherlands ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay in an attempt to stop online piracy—cutting off access to more than 80 percent of Dutch netizens. Around that time, researchers set out to study the effects of the censorship. What they found, recently released in a report titled "Baywatch", is that illegal downloads didn't go down, and in fact even increased in the year since the ban.

The team, from the University of Amsterdam, Tilburg University, and the Institute for Information Law, used two methods to reach their conclusion. First they surveyed some 2,000 Pirate Bay users at three, six, and ten months after the site was blocked, to gauge if their downloading activities had changed. While about half said they pirated content less often, a small group of users' nefarious behavior increased by a lot, making the net total a wash.

The second method backed this up. The team monitored BitTorrent file-sharing at the ISP level, using a "non-infringing" technology developed for the study. They found "no lasting net impact on the percentage of the Dutch population downloading from illegal sources, as people learn to use alternatives to TBP." Fans just turned to alternative torrenting sites, or managed to circumvent the ban by using proxy servers.

Yay, more evidence backing up what previous studies and basic common sense have already concluded: When there's a will there's a way. As with illicit substances, blocking access to the supply doesn't make the demand magically disappear. Eventually, the market finds a way to return to equilibrium. "The effect of legal action against file sharing often has an immediate effect which tends to fade out after a period of typically six months, as illegal supply and demand find other places to meet," the study found.

In the Netherlands' case, it didn't even take six months. Last July, just a few months after the ban, a study by the Dutch ISP XS4All reported that piracy had gone up. It found that traffic on its ports commonly used for BitTorrent increased. Nor is the pattern restricted to just the crafty Dutch. A study in the UK—which also ordered its ISPs to block The Pirate Bay last year, cutting off access to 50 million people—found only a slight drop in file-sharing, because copycat sites sprang up in its place.

The copycat effect is also what Northeastern University researchers reported in a study early this year. It found that blocking or seizing domains of cyberlockers like Rapidshare, Megaupload, or Mediafire did nothing to curb piracy—in a way, it backfired. The file-hosting landscape became more diverse, with hundreds of services cropping up to replace the top-dog sites that had been seized. Indeed, there are some 10,000 domains hosting pirated content—that's a lot of moles to whack.

"There is a cat-and-mouse game between uploaders and copyright owners, where pirated content is being uploaded by the former and deleted by the latter," the Northeastern study found. "Currently, this game seems to be in favor of the many pirates who provide far more content than what the copyright owners are taking down."

If doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is the definition of crazy, Big Media ought to have its head examined. It's high time we tried a different approach.