The collaboration between The Pirate Bay and the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University has resulted in their first academic publication. The researchers surveyed 75,000 people from all over the world and found that close to 70 percent of all Pirate Bay users are interested in hiding their IP-addresses, or hiding it already. According to the researchers the high interest in anonymizing services among file-sharers is a direct response to anti-piracy initiatives.

April last year The Pirate Bay renamed itself to The Research Bay to conduct the largest ever survey among file-sharers.

The BitTorrent site teamed up with the Cybernorms research group at Lund University, who are interested in how the Internet creates new social norms in society.

In three days the survey was filled out by 75,000 people and the researchers have now published some of the “Research Bay” results in the peer-reviewed Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing.

In the paper titled “Law, norms, piracy and online anonymity,” researcher Stefan Larsson and colleagues focus on the use of anonymizing services such as VPNs among Pirate Bay users.

The results reveal that nearly 70 percent of Pirate Bay users utilize a VPN or proxy, or are interested in doing so in the future.

The researchers found that of all respondents 17.8 percent already make efforts to hide their IP-addresses from the rest of the Internet. Another 51.4 percent do not use anonymizing services, but show an interest in signing up for one.

The paper alleges that the use of VPNs and proxies will increase as a direct result of the copyright enforcement and piracy monitoring initiatives that have been discussed or implemented in recent years.

“The broad interest for anonymisation is, in this study, understood as a function of social norms in the grass-root file-sharing community, as a response to the ongoing top-down copyright enforcement strategies,” the researchers write.

“Users involved in file-sharing communities seem to find anonymity services as a countermeasure for an increase in enforced traceability and identification of online activities,” they add.

Anonymous Pirate Bay users

Interestingly, the demand for anonymizing software differs per region. Hiding one’s IP-address is most common in Africa and North America with 19.7 and 19.5 percent respectively, and least common in Oceania where 14.4 percent of Pirate Bay users make efforts to be anonymous.

The paper further reports that frequent uploaders are more likely to operate anonymously. Nearly a third (30.9%) of Pirate Bay users who upload files nearly every day use an anonymizing service, versus 14 percent of those who never upload files at all.

Previous research has shown that the use of VPNs and proxies among BitTorrent users is increasing. This renders many of the proposed laws useless to a certain degree, and according to the researchers many file-sharers simply continue because they have social norms on their side.

Researcher Stefan Larsson tells TorrentFreak that he expect that the upcoming six-strikes plan in the United States will also lead to more people hiding their IP-addresses.

“Some people may stop or share less when they receive warnings, but there will also be a group that will respond to the warnings by becoming more anonymous. A third group will try to find other means to share files than BitTorrent, since these are not monitored,” Larsson says.

According to the researcher legislators should be more sensitive to the leading social norms. However, as things stand now, the divide between the law and social norms related to file-sharing will only grow bigger.

The harsh conclusion means that copyright holders will have a really hard time dealing with file-sharers through legislation. Those who want to pirate will find a way around it. That is, until VPNs and proxies become outlawed too.