The Pirate Bay has been the most popular torrent site for the past decade, but on Dec. 9 the Swedish police force managed to...

The Pirate Bay has been the most popular torrent site for the past decade, but on Dec. 9 the Swedish police force managed to raid the server room, shutting down the piracy site. What was marvelled as a big step towards beating piracy has had almost zero effect however, after six days piracy levels have returned back to 101 million, the same level before The Pirate Bay got shut down.

According to Excipio, a piracy researching firm, the piracy rate on Dec. 8 was 101 million, when The Pirate Bay went down it dropped to 98 million and then down against to 95 million, but on Dec. 12 the number jumped back up to 101 million. Part of this may have to do with IsoHunt’s relaunch of the classic The Pirate Bay, but most pirates were unscathed by the shutdown, as seen by the Dec. 9 and Dec. 10 figures. Over 90 percent of pirates found an alternative in hours.

It is not hard to find an alternative to The Pirate Bay and piracy experts claim shutting the network down might bring even tougher piracy sites into the market. This does reinforce the age-old argument that piracy cannot be dealt with through shutting down sites and getting court orders. It needs to come from value-for-money services that offer more than torrenting sites.

Spotify hit the nail on the head with its music streaming service. Users can listen to thousands of songs on the go, it has offline play and works on mobile, all for $9.99 per month. The streaming services for music have been an active deterrent to music piracy rates.

Netflix has also shown people want to subscribe to a service to watch movies and TV shows. More people subscribe to Netflix than HBO in the U.S. and millions continue to pay for the monthly subscription worldwide.

The film industry needs to understand that people are not going to pay $15 per movie, when they can watch thousands of films on Netflix for $7.99 a month, or simply pirate the film for free from one of the many services.

Unfortunately, the old media studios seem trapped in the 1990s, and piracy is still only a growing phenomena that can be tackled through website shutdowns.