In recent years, website blocking has become one of the most used anti-piracy mechanisms in the world.
ISPs in several dozen countries prevent subscribers from accessing a variety of "pirated" sites. New blocks are added every month and rights holders are actively pushing for extend the measure to the United States.
While site blocking is by no means a panacea, copyright holders are convinced that it has a noticeable effect and have research to back it up.
Piracy Blocking Investigation
One of the first peer-reviewed academic research, based on data from the United Kingdom, showed that local blocking of Pirate Bay had little effect on legal consumption. Instead, hackers turned to alternative pirate sites, proxy servers or VPNs to bypass virtual restrictions.
A follow-up study added more color and brought good news for rights holders. The research found that once a large number of sites in the UK were blocked, overall Traffic to the pirate site decreased.. At the same time, researchers saw an increase in traffic to legal services like Netflix.
These latter findings are frequently cited in policy debates surrounding site blocking. While the results are solid, they are also limited. They only apply to the UK situation, for example, and the long-term effects of site blocking efforts on piracy and legal consumption are not known.
New findings: India
A new non-peer-reviewed working paper published by researchers at Chapman University and Carnegie Mellon University aims to fill the first gap. Using a similar methodology to that seen in the previous UK study, the researchers studied the effects of the lockdown in India and Brazil.
In India, researchers studied two separate lockdown waves. The first took place in December 2019, when 380 hacked websites were blocked. The second wave was implemented in September 2020, when Indian ISPs blocked an additional 173 piracy sites.
Researchers checked browsing data to see if the blocks were effective and if hackers switched to unblocked sites. Visits to legal video entertainment services, including Netflix and Hotstar, were also monitored.
The results of these studies largely replicate the UK findings. India's first wave of lockdown caused an 8.1% increase in visits to legal sites, and the second wave caused a 3.1% increase. There was no statistically significant increase in visits to unblocked pirate sites.
Overall, the findings from India suggest that blocking sites can increase legal consumption without driving traffic to other unblocked pirate sites.
New findings: Brazil
Next, the researchers turned their attention to Brazil, where 174 piracy sites were blocked in July 2021. Using a similar research design, they found that these piracy site blocks resulted in a 5.2% increase in visits to paid streaming websites.
Unlike India, in Brazil there was a significant increase in traffic to unblocked pirate sites. This is similar to the "spreading" effect previously found in response to UK lockdowns.
[I]In Brazil, we found that blocking 174 piracy sites caused a statistically significant increase in visits to unblocked piracy sites, essentially dispersing some of the piracy,โ the researchers write.
'Pirate site blocking works'
These findings suggest that the positive effects of blocking pirate sites are not limited to the UK. This will be music to the ears of rights holders who want to expand the blocking of pirate sites globally, with the United States as the "holy grail."
โ[The research] provides evidence that the blocking of websites in Brazil and India in 2019, 2020 and 2021 has a similar effect to that it had in the United Kingdom in 2013 and 2014, despite the fact that during that time the piracy and consumption landscape legal has changed significantly.
"In summary, our results suggest that blocking pirated websites remains an effective strategy to increase legal consumption of copyrighted content," the researchers add.
While the latest study has not been separately peer-reviewed, it does in fact confirm previous findings. That said, piracy research is dynamic and never complete, so many questions remain unanswered.
More (lasting) conclusions?
One question that remains is that of the lasting effect on behavior. Previous studies only measure consumption patterns over the span of a few months, and it is possible that some pirates will eventually relapse.
Brett Danaher of Chapman University, lead author of the paper, acknowledges this shortcoming. Ideally, more longitudinal research would be done, but obtaining that type of data is not easy.
โThe biggest challenge is finding a panel company that tracks a consistent set of users over longer periods of time,โ Danaher tells TorrentFreak.
โWith the companies we have been working with, the panel size is reducing exponentially as we order longer panels. โIt is a real challenge.โ
The researcher mentions that there is a study that found that the effects of lockdown measures are short-lived, but that only applies to a unique site, Kino.to. This "relapse" finding was later supported by a Italian Studywhich included more than two dozen sites.
Danaher further explained that the latest study was not peer-reviewed because it is a replication study. The research uses the same methodology as the previously published British study, which was peer-reviewed and published in quarterly MIS.
"We thought there was useful information in this study and that the methodology itself had already undergone peer review, but the peer review process for this article would have been time-consuming with little chance of appearing in a top-tier journal." .
AMP Financing
Finally, it should be noted that this new India/Brazil study, like the previous ones, is carried out as part of the Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analysis (IDEA) at Carnegie Mellon University. The initiative is funded in part by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which is the driving force behind many global site blocking efforts.
The MPA has sent unrestricted donations to the IDEA center since 2012, totaling several million dollars. In recent years, the donation amounted to $1 million annually.
Of course, there is no evidence that the research results are in any way influenced by this funding. Connected researchers have repeatedly pointed out that they operate completely independently, which Danaher confirms.
"For me, the main value of the center is that it sometimes allows me to access data that I wouldn't otherwise have access to, but it protects me from outside influences," says Danaher, using film industry sales figures reported. used in a study. megaupload studio as an example
"In other words, once I obtain study data through the IDEA Center for a particular project, I am guaranteed the ability to publish my results for that article regardless of what they say," he adds.
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Danaher, Brett and Sivan, Liron and Smith, Michael D. and Telang, Rahul, The Impact of Online Piracy Website Blocking on Consumer Choices (February 12, 2024). Available on SSRN.
