Yet Another Study: 'Cracking Down' On Piracy Not Effective

from the duh dept

I know that some like to paint me -- falsely -- as being "pro-piracy" when I talk about why various attempts to use laws to "crackdown" on piracy are a bad idea. My concern is not that this will somehow "damage" piracy -- frankly, I couldn't care much less about that -- but with two specific things:

1. These laws almost always have massive and dangerous unintended consequences that hinder innovation, speech or both.
2. More importantly, these laws don't actually work at stopping piracy.

Given those two specific facts, you would think that maybe (just maybe) that those industries so focused on "stopping piracy" might, instead, focus on more productive solutions that cause less collateral damage. That means doing things like focusing on enabling or investing in new innovation.

Some will argue with the two points above, but I've yet to see anything that disproves either of them. Just as an example, this week we talked about a study from Oxford University that showed the dangerous consequences of 3-strikes laws, or other rules that lead to kicking people offline. And, now, we have another academic study that helps make the second point. Some research on file sharing sites found that anti-piracy measures simply don't work. In the academic version:

Our data shows that current anti-piracy efforts are visible, but their overall impact appears to be rather limited. Furthermore, our analysis of the file sharing ecosystem suggests that future antipiracy measures that are currently under discussion may not be as successful as their proponents might expect.

What's scary is that this still even needs to be said, or that certain maximalists still refuse to believe it, despite the massive amounts of evidence. Yet, they still keep focusing on the single strategy that's proven not to work, and ignore the strategy that does (building innovative businesses).