The most effective way to turn pirates into paid content subscribers might be to block as many piracy sites as quickly as possible. That’s according to a new study that found that only limiting access to the Pirate Bay does almost nothing to encourage illegal downloaders to access their favorite shows and movies through legal means.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Wellesley College examined data from the United Kingdom, where website blockades and domain seizures are much more common than in the U.S. Six British Internet service providers were ordered to block the Pirate Bay and 19 other sites that enable users to access copyrighted movies and video.

Blocking the Pirate Bay alone had no effect on the piracy ecosystem, researchers found. When the 19 other sites were blocked, the use of paid legal streaming sites increased by 12 percent.

The results would also seem to apply to the Pirate Bay’s followers and imitators. From Kickass Torrents and Megaupload to ETTV and YIFY, virtually every piracy site has suffered some form of blockade around the world.

“Our results show that blocking The Pirate Bay had little impact on consumption through legal channels — instead, consumers seemed to turn to other piracy sites, Pirate Bay ‘mirror’ sites, or Virtual Private Networks that allowed them to circumvent the block,” wrote researchers Brett Danaher, Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang in the abstract to “The Effect of Piracy Website Blocking on Consumer Behavior,” published last week.

Users who relied on the blocked sites least increased their clicks on paid streaming sites by 3 percent. Pirates who used the blocked sites most upped their paid streaming clicks by 23.6 percent, "strenghtening the causal interpretation of the results," the study said.

The study will come as no surprise to the legions of Internet users who have continued to download music, movie, television, software and other torrent files more than six months after the Pirate Bay was taken offline as part of a Swedish police raid. Not only has the site managed to live on, both in the form of tribute sites and malware-infused zombies, but its downfall also created a vacuum that other sites have rushed to fill.