Feb 20, 2024 09:00:00

Research results show that the amount of legitimate content consumed increases when pirated sites are blocked

Measures are being taken to prevent pirated content suspected of copyright infringement, such as blocking access to pirated sites and preventing them from appearing at the top of Google search results. In the past, there were

reports that ``online pirated copies do not have a negative impact on content sales,'' and there was also an opinion that ``the demographics that use pirated copies are different from the demographics that purchase legitimate content.'' A study published in February found that blocking pirated sites increased consumption of legitimate content in multiple countries.

The Impact of Online Piracy Website Blocking on Legal Media Consumption by Brett Danaher, Liron Sivan, Michael D. Smith, Rahul Telang :: SSRN
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4723522

Pirate Site Blocking Boosts Legal Consumption, Research Finds * TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-site-blocking-boosts-legal-consumption-research-finds-240216/

A major effort to eliminate pirated sites is to prevent access by blocking the domains of popular pirated sites from search results. Some pirated sites are in a `` whack-a-mole'' situation where they repeatedly change their domains in response to this blocking, and Google is processing more than 30 million removal requests per week. It has become clear.

The number of DMCA deletion requests to Google due to copyright violations is increasing day by day, reaching an all-time high. What are the causes and actual situation? -GIGAZINE

Blocking pirated sites is the most widely used anti-piracy measure in the world, but a 2015 study in the United Kingdom found that blocking one site did not increase consumption of legitimate content, and instead It was shown that the number of visits to other pirated sites that were not blocked increased. On the other hand, when many sites were blocked in a short period of time, the number of accesses to legitimate content increased by several percentage points.

A paper published by researchers at Chapman University and Carnegie Mellon University in the US uses a method similar to the UK study to study the effects of blocking in India and Brazil, and finds that the results vary widely by country. I checked if it's possible.

First, in India, regarding the two large-scale blocking cases in which 380 pirated sites were restricted in December 2019 and another 173 sites in September 2020, we will examine whether the blocking is effective and what sites will be affected as a result of the blocking. We investigated whether the number of users has increased. The sites studied for user growth include other unblocked pirated sites as well as legitimate services such as Netflix and Hotstar , an Indian streaming service run by a subsidiary of Disney. A similar study was conducted in Brazil, focusing on the blocking of 174 sites in July 2021.

Results showed that after large-scale blocking was implemented, access to legitimate content increased by 8.1% in India and by 5.2% in Brazil. Additionally, while India did not see an increase in traffic for unblocked pirated sites, Brazil saw a significant increase in traffic for other pirated sites.

A 2015 British study showed that blocking many sites at once was effective in driving people to legitimate content, and this study suggests that similar effects can be seen in other countries. I did. 'Our results suggest that blocking pirated websites remains an effective strategy to increase the legal consumption of copyrighted content,' the researchers said. I am.

Brett Danaher of Chapman University, lead author of the paper, said, ``The results of this study only measure consumption patterns in the months following the blocking, and use of pirated sites may recur after that.'' 'There is a need for long-term research to determine the lasting effects of blocking.'