Sanctioning illegality has not transformed the behavior of users. This is demonstrated by a report that unites two studies and was published on January 23. The authors tend to show that blocking pirate sites lowers Internet traffic and does not convert users to legal alternatives, reports the specialized media Torrent Fanatic.
The researchers investigated the impact of blocking pirate sites like BitTorrent. The global report is based on research from the American Carnegie Mellon University, complemented by that of the Catholic School of Business and Economics-Lisbon. The general study is based on British and probably Portuguese data, although the country of the second study is not disclosed. Portugal has implemented a voluntary blocking program for pirate sites, specifies Torrent fanatic.
The studies analyzed anonymous data from a random sample of 100,000 ISP subscribers. The data includes metrics such as download traffic, video-on-demand spend, total TV viewing time, and daily BitTorrent usage.
Paid services, big losers
According to the study, the blocking of these sites seems unstoppable: on BitTorrent, the number of users dropped sharply as soon as the block was put in place and then in the months that followed.
But users do not resort to legal offers. The researchers did not observe an increase in the use of paid services. There was only a slight increase of 2.5 minutes in the pirates’ total TV time.
Another study finding, Google’s increased requests for virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy servers.
Source: BFM TV
