Has Big Media learned nothing from the War on Drugs? Try as it might, the law can't seem to stop people from enjoying the finer things in life. Like marijuana. Or BitTorrents. But that doesn't stop it from trying.
Last spring, two court rulings in the Netherlands ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay in an attempt to stop online piracy—cutting off access to more than 80 percent of Dutch netizens. Around that time, researchers set out to study the effects of the censorship. What they found, recently released in a report titled "Baywatch", is that illegal downloads didn't go down, and in fact even increased in the year since the ban.
The team, from the University of Amsterdam, Tilburg University, and the Institute for Information Law, used two methods to reach their conclusion. First they surveyed some 2,000 Pirate Bay users at three, six, and ten months after the site was blocked, to gauge if their downloading activities had changed. While about half said they pirated content less often, a small group of users' nefarious behavior increased by a lot, making the net total a wash.
[[ source motherboard.vice ]]
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