14 DAY TRIAL // Taking down pirate website that provide copyrighted content to users across the world might seem like the logical thing to do for the entertainment industry, but it turns out that it has no effect whatsoever, and at best, there are zero profits to be made.
The logic behind the reasoning of the entertainment industry is that, if you take down any kind of website promoting piracy, you're going to get an increase in revenue as the users start buying instead of downloading illegally. It might sound like a sound strategy on paper, but in reality it doesn't really work that way.
What the entertainment industry doesn't seem to realize is that, every time you take down a website, others will take its place, usually with better protection and in countries that are hard to get into. This is what a study published by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre has found out, according to torrentfreak.com.
The entertainment industry doesn't understand piracy
This is the logical conclusion you can draw from what the study is showing. In most likelihood, this information is not exactly new to the entertainment industry. They've been at it for quite some time, and it's clear that a pattern emerges.
"Taking down copyright-infringing websites is a way to reduce consumption of pirated media content and increase licensed consumption. We analyze the consequences of the shutdown of the most popular German video streaming website - kino.to - in June 2011. Using individual-level clickstream data, we find that the shutdown led to significant but short-lived declines in piracy levels. The existence of alternative sources of unlicensed consumption, coupled with the rapid emergence of new platforms, led the streaming piracy market to quickly recover from the intervention and to limited substitution into licensed consumption," reads the study summary.
What they are basically saying is that the industry expects increases in sales after taking down pirate websites, but the study has shown that the increase in sales is negligible at best. The study looked at a raid that took down kino.to. The researchers analyzed the behavior of 5000 German users and found out that almost a third of them stopped pirating for a while and then resumed their habits. The increase of legitimate sales was around 2 or 3%.
If you add the cost of litigation and the cost of the raids themselves, it's hardly worth it. The fact that other services soon rise to take the place of the ones shut down should be proof enough that this particular course of action doesn't work.
Piracy is more than just a few websites
The bulk of users who download and share copyrighted materials are doing so in closed torrent trackers, not on websites like The PirateBay or Kickasstorrents. These are more visible because they are big and in the news, but they are not the source. The TV shows, movies, games, and the other content, they are all usually disseminated at first on IRC channel or other sources. No group actually uses torrents to publicize what they just ripped off.
Not all of the entertainment industry is stuck in the past. Services like Netflix, for example, have won a lot of users because they provide an easy way of watching a huge library of movies and TV shows at a fraction of the price, and it's very likely that similar services will be able to do more "harm" to piracy than any other legal measure concocted by the industry.