Entertainment industries are always up on their feet trying to deal with piracy and pirate related websites. New research released by the European Commission’s Join Research Centre suggests that shutting down pirate sites such as The Pirate Bay may actually have a negative effect on how secluded pirate sites are and may even be counterproductive to what the original goal was.
Europe witnessed the largest piracy-related shut down in history a few years ago following the raid on one of the most popular movie streaming portals, Kino.to.
One of the results to the huge bust was raids throughout Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands at people’s home residential addresses, data centres and the arrests of more than a dozen individuals connected to the Kino.to team.
The bust was considered as a huge success due to the shut down of the biggest streaming portal at the time. however, new research shows that the shutdown may have actually been counterproductive as the effect on users was relatively short and caused the upbringings of new pirate sites.
An experiment was carried out by a working paper titled “Online Copyright Enforcement, Consumer Behaviour, and Market Structure” were researchers studied clickstream data from 5,000 individual German Internet users, to see how their online addictions changed in result the shutdown.
Some of the information gathered by this experiment shows that the shutdown of Kino.to only had short term results on users piracy habits, a few weeks later the amount of piracy consumption returned to normal. Another conclusion found in the experiment is that there was only a very small increase in the use of legal services.
“While users of kino.to decreased their levels of piracy consumption by 30% during the four weeks following the intervention, their consumption through licensed movie platforms increased by only 2.5%,”
The researchers concluded that if you factor in the costs of the raids and prosecution, the shutdown most likely had no positive end effect.
The researchers stated, “Taken at face value, these results indicate that the intervention mainly converted consumer surplus into deadweight loss. If we were to take the costs of the intervention into account, our results would suggest that the shutdown of kino.to has not had a positive effect on overall welfare,”
One of the more shocking results of the experiments is that due to the shutdown of the biggest pirate site, even more pirate sites have been popping up than ever. The one site that dominated the word ‘piracy’ was soon replaced by several smaller sites, spreading out all of the users to more places. This is called the “Hydra” effect.
Because of the Hydra effect, it would cost even more of the tax-payers money in order to take down the vast majority of all of these new sites.
“This potentially makes future law enforcement interventions either more costly – as there would not be a single dominant platform to shutdown anymore – or less effective if only a single website is targeted by the intervention” the paper reads.
A huge number of visitors to other pirate sites began to rise after the shutdown of Kino.to:
In conclusion, the results from the shutdown of the biggest pirate site did not prevent any future piracy what so ever, and in fact, increased the size of the pirate site population.
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