Dr Brett Danaher.
Dr Brett Danaher, a visiting research professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, was in Sydney Tuesday night, presenting new research on the impact of court-ordered blocking of pirate sites at an event hosted by the Australian Screen Association (ASA).
Danaher has three criteria by which to evaluate the effectiveness of site blocking – whether it decreases visits to the blocked sites, whether it decreases total piracy, and whether it increases legal consumption.
“Measuring the causal effect of piracy website blocking is difficult", he said. "We studied three waves of court-ordered ISP site blocking in the UK using a dataset on actual Internet user behaviour,” said Dr Danaher.
Danaher's research has found that while blocking just one major piracy site does not reduce piracy or increase legal sales, simultaneously blocking a number of popular piracy sites caused a meaningful decrease in total piracy and a significant increase in legal consumption of video content.
In November 2014, 53 popular video piracy sites were blocked in the UK, a move which meaningfully reduced total piracy and led to a six percent increase in traffic to paid legal streaming sites (as well as a 10 percent increase in traffic to free legal streaming sites like Channel 5).
“There appear to be diminishing returns to additional waves of site blocks, and yet these waves may also serve to prevent a return to the prior status quo”, Danaher said.
John Jarratt, whose Wolf Creek series is about to launch on Stan, said: “You’d put a lock on your door if someone kept breaking in and stealing your DVDs, so why not put a block on the portals and stop the buggers who operate the sites stealing our digital DVDs?”
Executive Chairman of the Australian Screen Association Paul Muller said, “Disabling pirate websites via the courts is one tool we can use that we know will have an impact on piracy. However this is part of a bigger strategy that includes better legislation, a strong education program, continuing to make legal content available and affordable and the overall desire for people to want to do the right thing."
“Changing people’s attitudes and behaviours is a long running process. Just like it took a long time for people to look differently at smoking, it is going to take people a long time to think differently about piracy".