Last week, Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, was shut down. While the hope for anti-piracy organizations was that the shut down would have a major impact on copyright infringement, it turns out, but an anti-piracy tracking company’s own statistics, this was absolutely not the case.
On December 9th, Reuters reported that authorities have once again shut down Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay had lasted much longer than many observers predicted. A previous raid did not take down the site down permanently. Ever since numerous attempts of taking down the site failed, the site seemed almost unreachable with suggestions that the site had countless mirrors.
Still, it seems that this latest raid may have finally brought down the famous site in an unprecedented fashion. While it may be possible the site will some day resurface, that doesn’t seem to be in the cards in the immediate future.
For some, one of the big question was, did this high profile shut down have any real impact on copyright infringement. A report from Variety suggests that whatever disruption there was on file-sharing in general, it was negligible and short lived:
On Monday, Dec. 8, a total of 101.5 million Internet addresses worldwide were engaged in torrent downloads of relevant titles tracked by anti-piracy firm Excipio (including movies, TV shows, music, videogames, software and other digital media). On Dec. 9, Swedish law-enforcement authorities — acting on a complaint from an anti-piracy group based in the country — descended on a Web-hosting facility used by Pirate Bay and confiscated its servers and other equipment.
The result: The total number of IP addresses engaged in peer-to-peer downloads of content tracked by Excipio dropped slightly from 99.0 million on Dec. 9 to 95.0 million and 95.6 million the following two days, before bouncing back to 100.2 million on Friday, Dec. 12. That’s roughly in line with the daily average of 99.9 million since Nov. 1, according to Excipio.
While some have suggested that the site has made an official return with the .cr domain, the only site that is even remotely real is a search engine powered by ISOHunt called OldPireateBay.org. Even still, other sites are also picking up the slack where The Pirate Bay has left off. It would seem that users simply saw the shut down and ultimately moved on to other sources. Such a thing is not only not unprecedented, but also seemingly tradition ever since, at least, Napste was shut down.
When Napster was shut down, users moved on to other networks like WinMX, Gnutella (ala Morpheus and Bearshare), and the Fast Track network (Kazaa and its variants like Kazaa-Lite). When the Fast Track network became heavily polluted thanks to a weak hashing system, users simply opted to go to other networks like ED2K (via the official client or eMule), the other networks already available, or the newly emerging BitTorrent protocol. When SuprNova was shut down, users simply flocked to other sites like MiniNova. When MiniNova changed policies on what Torrent files were to be hosted, other sites like The Pirate Bay likely got a nice influx of users. One could continue on with endless examples, really. So, for long time observers such as myself, seeing users flock to other sites after The Pirate Bay was shut down is of absolutely no surprise.
In fact, one could easily argue that the shut down of the Pirate Bay only served to make headlines. What it exactly accomplished in any practical sense was, well, exactly nothing outside of maybe a symbolic victory for anti-piracy organizations. People simply shifted around to other sites and everything continues on as before. In short, anti-piracy organizations simply scores a hollow victory and nothing more. Nothing really new here, it’s simply history repeating itself again.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
