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UPDATED 10 June 2015: This story has been updated with additional information and clarifications.

The Pirate Bay has been officially blocked in the UK since 2012, at least by major ISPs. However, bans on singular offending sites have little impact in isolation on the behaviour of people accessing illegal content, research from two American universities has found.


Bans on larger numbers of sites in a short period were found to have much greater effect, however.

In a paper titled "The Effect of Piracy Website Blocking on Consumer Behaviour", researchers from Pennsylvania's Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts' Wellesley College write 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."

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The project, by Wellesley's Brett Danaher and Carnegie Mellon's Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang, explored how consumer behaviour was affected after two different blocking orders were enacted by the High Court: the 2012 Pirate Bay block, and the subsequent ban of 19 other sites between October and November 2013. The two periods were studied separately, with the former seeing "no increase in the adoption of legal distribution services for digital movies and television".

Separate European research had previously concluded blocks have "no positive effect". In that report, by the European Commission Joint Research Centre, a 2011 raid by authorities on illegal streaming site kino.to also had little impact, with new pirate sources springing up in the wake of the shutdown.

For the Carnegie Mellon/Wellesley College studies, the researchers explain that they approached things differently. They employed "novel datasets that allow us to study these events with arguably greater precision than prior work." Where previous research into downloaders' activities relied on using market data -- sales figures and other publicly released figures, often provided only by movie studios and record labels -- the trio "obtained panel data on the actual behaviour of a large group of internet users in the UK".

Although single site blocks were found to be ineffective, Danaher, Smith, and Telang found the later wave of mass site blockings to be much more effective. Following the bulk blocks in 2013, use of sites such as Netflix spiked by around 12 percent, they said. "We observe that this caused some consumers to disperse to other piracy sites or to adopt technologies that allow circumvention of the block," the researchers said.


It is worth considering that Netflix had only launched in the UK in January 2012; hit original series House of Cards didn't debut until February 2013, with Orange is the New Black following in July. The appeal of first-run exclusive content could have attracted customers to the streaming service as much as the pirate sites being blocked.

The researchers said that their research controlled for such spikes, and that their broader conclusions depend on isolating the impact of closing piracy sites on adoption of other services. The full methodology is outlined in the report. The researchers also said that "it is likely that the higher visits to legal streaming sites ... reflect the fact that paid legal streaming sites like Netflix had higher adoption levels by October 2013 than they had in May 2012." "Although we cannot rule out alternative explanations, we believe the most likely explanation is that when a single site is blocked, many pirates will know at least one other good site," the researchers write, "but when many sites are blocked, the cost to find another reliable site is higher for all but the most active pirates".

Expect to see further wide-reaching site blocks if copyright holders and the court system take Danaher, Smith, and Telang's findings into consideration.