news New research based on data from the UK has suggested that site blocking can be effective against online piracy of digital content.
The work was carried out by Dr Brett Danaher, visiting research professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University who looked at the effectiveness of court-ordered site blocking of pirate sites.
Dr Danaher had presented his findings to content creators and distributors, lawyers, academics and media representatives at an event hosted by the Australian Screen Association (ASA) on 10 May.
The researcher has studied the effects of site blocking since 2012. For this study, he focused on the three levels of evaluating the effectiveness of site blocking: being whether it decreases visits to the blocked sites, whether it decreases total piracy, and whether it increases legal consumption.
“Measuring the causal effect of piracy website blocking is difficult. We studied three waves of court-ordered ISP site blocking in the UK using a dataset on actual Internet user behaviour,” Dr Danaher said.
The findings indicated that blocking a single major piracy site was not effective at reducing piracy or increasing legal sales.
In May 2012, The Pirate Bay, the UK’s most popular piracy site, was blocked. However, the action caused only a small decrease in total piracy, according to the researcher.
Instead, most users turned to other unblocked piracy sites or employed to virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent the block.
“There was no causal increase in legal consumption of video content,” he said.
However, in November 2013, 19 major video piracy sites were blocked in the UK.
This simultaneous blocking of a number of popular piracy sites caused a “meaningful reduction” in total piracy and also caused users to increase their usage of paid legal streaming sites (such as Netflix) by 12%.
The research also suggested that further phases of site blocking continued to affect levels of piracy and legal consumption.
In November 2014, 53 video piracy sites were blocked in the UK, caused a “meaningful” reduction in total piracy and a 6% increase in traffic to paid, legal streaming sites, according to the research.
“There appear to be diminishing returns to additional waves of site blocks, and yet these waves may also serve to prevent a return to the prior status quo,” said Dr Danaher.
Cowlick Entertainment Group’s Senior Producer and Development Executive, Bridget Callow-Wright, commented: “The reality is that the sites like these are eroding the future of young Australian creatives and are making it harder and harder for us to have sustainable careers in the business.”
Executive Chairman of the Australian Screen Association, Paul Muller, said that disabling pirate websites via the courts is just one of the tools that can be used that will have an impact on piracy. However, better legislation, education, and making legal content available and affordable are also part of the process.
Additionally, he added, there is “the overall desire for people to want to do the right thing”.
“Changing people’s attitudes and behaviours is a long running process. Just like it took a long time for people to look differently at smoking, it is going to take people a long time to think differently about piracy,” Muller concluded.
The research cited in this article can be viewed on the Social Science Research Network website.
Image credit: HBO