The European Commission (EC) has finally confirmed what we’ve all known for years: if you shut down one online piracy site, another will simply take its place. A report published by the EC’s Joint Research Center found that the closure of specific site providing illegal content, had little impact on national online piracy.
In 42 pages, the team of researchers has analyzed the web activity of several thousand German people, and found that while there was a sharp decline right after the site was pulled offline by the police, average piracy levels quickly returned to normal. Also new illegal sites rose to prominence, demonstrating that, pulling of a illegal site does little to encourage licensed alternatives.
As the report says „In recent years, one of the most prominent type of intervention involves governments’ seizures of specific platforms hosting or providing access to pirated content.“. This is disturbing because you have to involve the government in limitation of data on the internet. Popular example is the famous Pirate bay. Last year in december, Police in Sweden carried out a raid in Stockholm, seizing servers, computers, and other equipment. At the same time The Pirate Bay disappeared offline. This one is one of the biggest pull offs ever. After only two months, the site reapeared back online. Copyright law of a country can require a host to take action against sites that violate the rights of third parties. Here comes the problem for the intellectual property protection, because the Pirate bay is using magnet links.
“The problem here is that the technology used, so called ‘magnet links’, is not violating the right of 3rd parties directly,” the company providing hosting solution for the biggest torrent site, says.
“There is actually no copyright infringement originating from websites such as ‘thepiratebay.se’ which makes it a very complex case which is open for a lot of interpretation and discussions. We stand behind all our clients as long as they use our services for a legal purpose,” the company concludes.
So this leaves the Copyright holders one possibility – intervention – referred to as “demand-side” intervention – concentrates its effort on the end consumers of copyright infringing content in order to discourage consumption of such products. These typically include lawsuits against individual users or the introduction of graduated response laws such as the HADOPI law in France, where consumers found guilty of copyright infringement would potentially face loss of Internet access after two warnings and repeated infringement. This clearly did not work. The HADOPI anti-piracy law that would disconnect those suspected of copyright infringement, was revoked on 8 July 2013 by the French Government because the punitive penalties imposed on copyright infringers were considered to be disproportionate, and replaced with a system of automatic fines, it was announced in a official government report.
As a conclusion, the report says that the shutdown of the illegal site resulted in a much more fragmented structure of the market for unlicensed movie streaming.
In other words, the government pulls off a big illegal site, and right after that in the opening begin appearing many little sites providing illegal content. So the government action against illegal sites proves to be futile.
It is also a theft (even if legal) extending the Mickey Mouse law forever.
Copyright Term Extension Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
Expiration of all author rights after 20 years, like for patents. BTW, any CD, DVD, Blu-ray, etc or book downloaded from authors without any form of DRM for one dollar practically and effectively destroys piracy overnight, and boosts sales thousands of times worldwide. A win for all.
But they are too greedy to understand it, and thus, they will become extinct like dinosaurs. Because Internet changes it all, nobody can control-own-censor it in the free world, and is here to stay. So, just decide: greed and extinction, or fair price and prosperity.
I don’t know. Mickey Mouse is an active character. Perhaps the laws do need to change but not in a way that would Tear Mickey Mouse from Disney. Perhaps the laws need to take into account the amount of use the object has. So some game IP that has not been used in a few decades falls off but something like Mario that is always having games made doesn’t. The same sort of thing would stop patent trolls. The ones that have a patent on something but don’t use it.
What is needed is a way for people to quickly and cheaply purchase, download, and/or stream the content they want from anywhere, free from regional or DRM restrictions. Until that happens piracy rates will not fall.
I have been forced to pirate too many things I truly love and will gladly pay for simply because of all sorts of restrictions or being not available in my region. :/
I could have told you this 15 years ago. And again I will repeat myself – hopefully someone out there is listening.
You cannot stop piracy. It’s simply not gonna happen, get used to it. People are always gonna pirate. What you can do however, is reduce piracy whilst keeping profits where you want them.
The trick to is not to shut sites down in order to reduce piracy. If you want to do that then all you have to do is create a much easier, simpler, better, higher quality and reasonably priced alternative that doesn’t have regional restrictions with all the latest releases and the entire back catalogue of old – and people will flock to you like there’s no tomorrow – and you’ll make an absolute shedload of cash in doing so. If you’re making all the money you want to make and more, does it actually matter that some people will still pirate? Not really.
It’s 2015, the infrastructure is in place to do this tomorrow if you like. Please for the love of god, do it. I’m sick of torrents and I’m not paying £15 a pop for a new releases. I would however pay around £25/month for such a service.
Great point!Tottaly agree with you .:)
Great review! Need more information though… Just finished college assignement on the subject, glad to hear there are more people like you! Keep up the good work guys!