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In 2011, police officers across Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands swept into the homes and data centres of a group running one of the largest illegal streaming sites in Europe, kino.to. For those authorities, it was a massive coup in the battle against online piracy -- a costly one in terms of resources but nevertheless a great PR move.

Four years on, however, and a European Commission Joint Research Centre report has put something of a dampener on that political triumph. Published online this week, the report has concluded that shutting down the site not only made only very little (and short-lived) difference to the amount of pirated content being consumed, it in fact led to some healthy competition in the online piracy world. It provides evidence of the oft reported "Hydra" effect, where pirates simply move to multiple, smaller resources to get content, rather than sticking with one service.


The Joint Research Centre looked at clickstream data of 5,000 users to track and analyse behaviour prior to and following the shutdown of the kino.to. As well as looking at traffic to illegal and legal streaming services, it measured potential increases in "offline" consumption of media by collating visits to websites related to cinemas and DVD purchases. They found that in the month that followed the kino.to shutdown, piracy levels dropped by 30 percent. But the users this figure represented did not suddenly switch to legal, paid-for alternatives. The researchers noted only a 2.5 percent increase of traffic to licensed platforms, remarking that closing kino.to simply created "deadweight loss" -- consumers flocking to pirated content did not suddenly transform into a new demographic for legal services.

In reality, the piracy market recovered quickly to pre-kino.to levels following the emergence of 22 new streaming platforms, demonstrating the whack-a-mole effect of combatting piracy with shutdowns is as prevalent as ever -- new services will just keep in coming. The researchers conclude that the glut of pirated content online and the emergence of a multitude of new platforms to choose from, combined with the low cost of switching between preferred providers, "led the streaming piracy market to quickly recover from the intervention".

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They go on to suggest that the kino.to shutdown may actually have made life worse for the authorities: "The postshutdown market structure was much more fragmented, thus making it potentially more resistant to any future interventions." "If we were to take the costs of the intervention into account (raid, criminal prosecution, etc), our results would suggest that the shutdown of kino.to has not had a positive effect on overall welfare," they conclude.

They do, however, note that the study has some limitations. For instance, consumers might be using more offline resources that are not easily tracked. But on an anecdotal level, that's highly unlikely -- it would mean a significant change to consumer behaviours that have increasingly moved towards, not away from, online consumption of media.

There were also, however, fewer legal streaming alternatives in Germany at the time. Netflix had not yet launched in Germany, and there weren't many pay-per-view streaming options -- traditional DVD rental services still dominated the market. However the data gathered did include user visits to Maxdome, Lovefilm, Videoload, and iTunes.


This is where the research team really starts to hedge its bets. The study took place in 2011, lightyears away in internet years when we look at the fast pace of media moving online. Today, the results of the study might be markedly different they suggest. "The results of these anti-piracy interventions may well be very different in an environment with more and better licensed offers available to consumers," they said. "In particular, they may be more effective in converting consumers from unlicensed to licensed consumption." So today, with more legal options at our disposal, they postulate that a shutdown might yet convert the pirating public into paying consumers.

On the flipside, in that same timeframe the landscape of illegal streaming has also changed dramatically. As the researchers noticed even at the time, shutting down one source opened up a multitude of opportunities for other streaming sites. It drove competition, and there's even more abundance of that evident today. What that means for European authorities, is more time, money and legal battles -- shutting down one source would not have the effect it did in 2011 when kino.to was taken offline. More manpower would be needed today to combat the many smaller operations, to make up the same amount of small difference the kino.to shutdown delivered.

As a European Commission report, the paper comes at the issue from an economic perspective: battling online piracy across the continent is a costly affair, and so the paper asks if it's one worth pursuing by seeking the empirical evidence to provide the taxpayer with answers. Looking at the potential resilience of a fragmented post-kino.to market, they are not convinced it is.