Much like the war on drugs, the fight against online piracy is futile. Researchers for the European Commission found that shutting down major piracy sites had little effect on piracy because once authorities take one down, users shift to other sites or create new ones, according to a recent study.
The study “Online Copyright Enforcement Consumer Behavior, and Market Structure” jointly produced by the Commission and Joint Research Centre found that taking down popular site kino.to only resulted in a steep but temporary drop in unlicensed video streaming.
Pirated traffic decreased 30 percent in the four weeks after the government shutdown the site in 2011. Pirated traffic soon rebounded when kino.to users switched to other existing movie piracy sites and 22 new streaming services emerged. Traffic to licensed movie-streaming sites didn’t budge after the take-down, increasing merely 2.5 percent, the study found.
“Taken at face value, these results indicate that the intervention mainly converted consumer surplus into deadweight loss,” researchers wrote. “If we were to take the costs of the intervention into account (raid, criminal prosecution, etc.), our results would suggest that the shutdown of kino.to has not had a positive effect on overall welfare.”
Researchers did note some of the study’s limitations, such as excluding offline or Tor activity and focusing on four-year old internet traffic from 2011. There were also few streaming site options — pirated and legal — in Germany when the study was conducted. (Netflix didn’t become available in Germany and other European countries until 2014.)
But despite its shortcomings, the study gives a rare look into the effect of government anti-piracy efforts:
These anti-piracy interventions are not guaranteed to be effective. First, given the existence of numerous alternative platforms offering copyright infringing content, it is not obvious that the take-down of a specific unlicensed website would lead to a reduction in overall piracy. If users are able to easily switch across platforms, the intervention may result in a simple transfer of consumption from one unlicensed website to another proving the impotence of government anti-piracy efforts.
Researchers concluded that “any anti-piracy intervention should therefore, as a minimum requirement, manage to convert unlicensed consumers into licensed ones for it to be justified.”
Past studies analyzing piracy behavior have found improvement of legal sales of movies and other copyrighted content after shutting down piracy websites. A 2013 study out of Carnegie Mellon University found that sales for 12 countries for two movie houses increased at least 6 percent in the weeks after Megaupload.com was shut down.
Law enforcement agencies have long attempted to quell online piracy by shutting down sites and prosecuting their administrators. In December, Swedish police raided and shut down operations of the Pirate Bay, the internet’s largest torrent-file sharing site, for violating copyright laws. The raid had a domino effect, taking several torrent sites down with Pirate Bay, but the site was back up and running in March after Pirate Bay administrators moved to cloud storage in two countries.
Like other BitTorrent-like sites, Pirate Bay didn’t actually host pirated content but instead facilitated the download of copyrighted content from multiple sources. After the Pirate Bay raid, BitTorrent enthusiasts created a new client Tribler, which doesn’t rely on central servers and lets users shield their IP addresses when sharing or posting files.
In the U.S., entertainment industry groups have been pushing for more anti-piracy policies in addition to making legal pathways more accessible. The Record Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America asked ICANN, the non-profit group in charge of naming and organizing the internet domains, to crack down on sites that supported copyright-infringed content.
ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was formerly controlled by U.S. officials but is shifting to more operational independence this year. The politically charged move has drawn sharp criticism from internet freedom advocates who worry that looser interpretations of piracy could lead to more online censorship.
For example, ICANN could revoke certain domain names, or take action against sites it believes haven’t done enough to prevent piracy efforts. There are currently no laws mandating registrars like ICANN disconnect from pirate sites.
Piracy, however, has and will likely always be a constant in media consumption. About half of Americans get their entertainment purely through legal channels. Many opt to burn discs, share and copy files from family or friends, download music or movies for free, or buy bootleg DVDs, according to a Columbia University report on media piracy. And very few, about 3 percent for music and 1 percent for movies and TV shows, pirate content regularly, amassing collections of thousands of files.
Update:
This post has been updated to include information from past studies.