Mass Piracy Website Blocks by UK ISPs Fuel Legal Alternatives

A new study, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Chapman University, has examined the impact of forcing UK broadband ISPs to block individual piracy websites (via court order) and discovered that it caused a decrease in overall piracy, as well as a 7 to 12% increase in the use of legal subscription sites.

At present the biggest ISPs (e.g. BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Virgin Media, Plusnet etc.) can be forced by a court to block websites that are found to heavily facilitate internet copyright infringement, which is underpinned by Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.

Since 2012 well over 100 piracy sites have been blocked as a result of this, including several thousand proxy sites and mirrors. Most of those have been file sharing (P2P / Torrent) and video streaming sites, although we’ve also seen similar action against sites that infringe trademarks (e.g. selling counterfeit goods).

The existing process is very expensive and time consuming for both sides to pursue and implement, although Rights Holders often deem it to be a price worth paying as part of their wider efforts to discourage casual piracy. The latest research paper also appears to support that, albeit with the caveat that you have to block a fair few sites to create a real impact.

The study found that blocking a single site in 2012 caused no increase in the use of legal sites, but instead caused users to increase visits to other unblocked piracy sites and Virtual Private Networks (VPN). However, blocking 19 piracy sites in 2013 and 53 sites in 2014 caused a decrease in piracy and an increase in use of legal subscription sites of 7 to 12%, as well an increase in new paid subscriptions.

The researchers concluded that the number of channels disrupted – and thus, the strength of the intervention – affected the effectiveness of this type of anti-piracy enforcement. They suggest it is likely that this was due to the “increased search and learning costs” associated with piracy (i.e. the costs incurred when pirate sites are blocked and people have to invest time and effort to find and learn how to use new sites, or choose to use legal sites that cost money).

Rahul Telang, CMUHC Professor of Information Systems, said:

“Our results show that blocking access to popular pirate sites reduced overall piracy and increased consumers’ use of paid legal channels.”

The latest work appears to be an extension of a similar report that was conducted in 2015 (here), albeit examining a larger selection of blocks. The study also has a number of limitations. First, they studied legal consumption of media only through paid legal subscription sites; users may consume media legally in other ways.

Second, the results may underestimate the effect of website blocking on legal consumption. And third, because the study looked at consumer activity for only three months after each wave of blocked channels, it could not determine how long the impacts lasted. The study is also broadly based around identifying the “causal effect” of the blocks by comparing individuals’ pre-post changes (educated guess work).

Nevertheless the results are interesting, although arguably a bigger challenge going forward could be the rapidly increasing fragmentation of legal alternatives (something we warned about in 2016). For example, in video streaming there are various paid platforms from Netflix, NOW TV, Amazon (Prime Video), Disney+, Apple and more, all of which tend to increase in price.

In order to get all of the content you want it may be necessary to subscribe to all of the above, which quickly becomes fairly expensive (more so than a subscription to a linear TV package). As such the biggest threat to legal content is the impact of its own fragmentation, which could push users back toward unlawful solutions. Natural competition makes this one difficult to resolve.