All around the world the copyright lobby is pushing for increased censorship of ‘pirate’ websites, The Pirate Bay in particular. Thus far this has resulted in court-ordered blockades in several countries including the UK and the Netherlands. The question that remains is whether these measures have any effect. Researchers from the University of Amsterdam suggest they don’t, and in a new report they show that the court-ordered Pirate Bay block has had no impact on local piracy rates.
The Pirate Bay is arguably the most censored website on the Internet. Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and more are expected to follow.
The idea behind these blockades is that they will help to decrease online piracy. However, research increasingly suggests that this aim is not being fulfilled. In fact, the blocking attempts may actually be having the opposite effect.
Today, University of Amsterdam researchers, together with Tilburg University’s CentERdata, released a new report which evaluates how the Dutch Pirate Bay blockade affected local piracy habits.
Titled “Baywatch,” the paper uses survey results as well as data from BitTorrent trackers to assess the effectiveness of the blocking measures.
The report finds that of all respondents who admit that they’ve downloaded files from illegal sources over the past half-year, between 20 and 25 percent say they stopped or downloaded less after the Pirate Bay blockade came into effect.
While this could be interpreted as a clear success for the blockade, the researchers don’t see any evidence for this in the rest of the data.
Read more at TorrentFreak