Friday, February 16, 2024

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Pirate Site Blocking Boosts Legal Consumption, Research Finds
Ernesto Van der Sar, 16 Feb 11:33 AM

blockedIn recent years, website blocking has become one of the most widely-used anti-piracy enforcement mechanisms in the world.

ISPs in several dozen countries prevent subscribers from accessing a variety of 'pirate' sites. New blocks are added every month and rightsholders are actively lobbying to expand the measure to the United States.

While site blocking is by no means a panacea, copyright holders are convinced that it has a notable effect and have research to back this up.

Piracy Blocking Research

One of the earliest pieces of peer-reviewed academic research, based on UK data, showed that the local Pirate Bay blockade had little effect on legal consumption. Instead, pirates turned to alternative pirate sites, proxies, or VPNs to bypass the virtual restrictions.

A follow-up study added more color and brought good news for rightsholders. The research found that once a large number of sites were blocked in the UK, overall pirate site traffic decreased. At the same time, the researchers observed an increase in traffic to legal services such as Netflix.

The latter findings are frequently cited in policy discussions around site blocking. While the results are solid, they are limited too. They only apply to the UK situation, for example, and the long-term effects of site-blocking efforts on piracy and legal consumption are missing.

New Findings: India

A new non-peer-reviewed working paper published by Chapman University and Carnegie Mellon University researchers aims to fill the first gap. Using similar methodology to that seen in the earlier UK study, the researchers studied the effects of blocking in India and Brazil.

The working paper

blocking study

In India, the researchers studied two separate blocking waves. The first took place in December 2019, when 380 piracy websites were blocked. The second wave was implemented in September 2020, when Indian ISPs blocked 173 additional piracy sites.

The researchers checked browsing data to see if the blocks were effective and whether pirates switched to unblocked sites. Visits to legal video entertainment services, including Netflix and Hotstar, were monitored as well.

The results of these studies largely replicate the UK findings. The first Indian blocking wave triggered an 8.1% increase in visits to legal sites, and the second wave led to a 3.1% increase. There was no statistically significant increase in visits to unblocked pirate sites.

Overall, the Indian findings suggest that site blocking can increase legal consumption without driving traffic to other, unblocked pirate sites.

New Findings: Brazil

Next, the researchers turned their attention to Brazil, where 174 piracy sites were blocked in July 2021. Using a similar research design, they found that these pirate site blocks resulted in a 5.2% increase in visits to paid streaming websites.

Unlike in India, there was a significant increase in traffic to unblocked pirate sites in Brazil. This is similar to the 'dispersion' effect that was previously found in response to UK blockades.

[I]n Brazil we found that blocking 174 piracy sites caused a statistically significant increase in visits to unblocked piracy sites, in essence dispersing some piracy," the researchers write.

'Pirate Site Blocking Works'

These findings suggest that the positive effects of pirate site blocking are not limited to the UK. This will be music to the ears of rightsholders who wish to expand pirate site blocking globally, with the US as the 'holy grail'.

"[The research] provides evidence that website blocking in Brazil and India in 2019, 2020, and 2021 has a similar effect as it did in the UK in 2013 and 2014, despite the fact that during that intervening time the landscape of piracy and legal consumption has changed significantly.

"In short, our results suggest that piracy website blocking remains an effective strategy for increasing legal consumption of copyrighted content," the researchers add.

While the latest study isn't peer-reviewed separately, it indeed confirms the earlier findings. That said, piracy research is dynamic and never complete, so many questions remain unanswered.

More (Lasting) Conclusions?

One question that remains concerns the lasting effect on behavior. The studies above only measure consumption patterns in the span of a few months, and it's possible that some pirates eventually relapse.

Brett Danaher of Chapman University, the lead author of the paper, recognizes this shortcoming. Ideally, he would like to do more longitudinal research but obtaining that type of data is not easy.

"The biggest challenge there is finding a panel company that tracks a consistent set of users for longer periods of time," Danaher tells TorrentFreak.

"With the companies we've been working with, the size of the panel shrinks exponentially as we ask for longer panels. It's a real challenge."

The researcher mentions that there is a study that found that the effects of blocking measures are short-lived, but that only applies to a single site, Kino.to. This 'relapse' finding was later supported by an Italian study, that included over two dozen sites.

Danaher further explained that the latest study wasn't peer-reviewed because it's a replication study. The research uses the same methodology as the previously published UK study, which was peer-reviewed and published in MIS Quarterly.

"Our thought was that there was useful information in this study and the methodology itself has already undergone peer review, but the peer review process for this paper would have taken a lot of time with little probability of landing in a premier journal."

MPA Funding

Finally, it should be noted that this new India/Brazil study, like previous ones, is carried out as part of Carnegie Mellon University's Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics (IDEA). The initiative is partly funded by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) which is the driving force behind many global site blocking efforts.

The MPA has sent unrestricted gifts to IDEA center since 2012, totaling several million dollars. In recent years, the gift amounted to $1 million annually.

There is no evidence that the research findings are in any way influenced by this funding, of course. The connected researchers have repeatedly pointed out that they operate completely independently, which Danaher confirms.

"To me, the top value of the center is that it allows me to sometimes access data to which I otherwise would not have access but protects me from outside influences," Danaher notes, using the movie industry sales figures that were used in a Megaupload study as an example

"In other words, once I get studio data through the IDEA Center for a particular project, I am guaranteed the ability to publish my results for that paper regardless of what they say," he adds.

Danaher, Brett and Sivan, Liron and Smith, Michael D. and Telang, Rahul, The Impact of Online Piracy Website Blocking on Consumer Choices (February 12, 2024). Available at SSRN.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Piracy Shield IPTV Blocks Reportedly Hit Zenlayer CDN's Innocent Customers
Andy Maxwell, 15 Feb 08:46 PM

Logo piracy shieldThere's no shortage of reasonable arguments that support the existence of a comprehensive anti-piracy system in Italy, capable of returning revenue to broadcasters, local football clubs, and rightsholders in general.

On the other side of the debate, consumers of pirate IPTV services argue that a virtual monopoly, in which competition isn't allowed to exist, is the very reason pirate IPTV services became so popular in the first place.

In the middle of this chasm of differences are those who warned that the supposed solution to piracy of live sports – the much heralded Piracy Shield system – could end up causing collateral damage without proper checks and balances. However, a soft launch in December passed without incident and following Piracy Shield's full launch late January, no significant controversies marred the automated blocking system's first two weeks on the frontlines.

Rightsholders Open The Firehose

After a sensibly tentative start, last weekend saw Piracy Shield put through its toughest test yet, DDAY.it reported Monday. After previously being asked to block just a handful of IP addresses, over 400 IP addresses were requested last Saturday.

Why Piracy Shield crashed in response isn't especially clear. DDAY.it, which appears to have an insider somewhere in the system, believes that thousands of simultaneous requests may have been too much for an underpowered server. That's not impossible or even unlikely but for rightsholders who claim to be losing hundreds of millions of euros every year to piracy, failing to commit enough resources is completely avoidable.

Of more concern was a claim that the IP address of an unnamed CDN company in the UK had been added to the blocklist. Since CDN IP addresses may be in use by more than one service at a time, the risk of overblocking is obviously a concern. In this case, however, the block reportedly did its job without any collateral damage. The same may not be true for new blocks reported this morning.

Zenlayer CDN IP Addresses Reportedly Blocked

One of the notable aspects of the first Piracy Shield actions reported by regulator AGCOM, was the targeting of web-based pirate services rather than the less visible IPTV platforms causing most disruption in Italy. After so many IP addresses were targeted last weekend, it seems likely that recent targets were indeed IPTV streams and related infrastructure.

According to DDAY, however, blocks that targeted web-based movie streaming sites were also placed on the platform in recent days and that may not have gone exactly as planned.

"About ten IP addresses belonging to the Zenlayer CDN thus ended up among the blocks and this caused the blocking of absolutely legitimate services and sites that were distributed by the CDN itself," the publication notes. "Cloud4C, a cloud provider, is unreachable from Italy and the same goes for the control panel of the [Zenlayer] CDN itself, which is also blocked."

Establishing the existence of localized blocking from outside the affected territory isn't always straightforward. However, an Italian user on Twitter soon confirmed that cloud4c.com could not be accessed from his connection.

cloud blocked

A TorrentFreak source also confirmed the domain was inaccessible from a connection supplied by Telecom Italia, Italy's largest internet service provider. Checking local DNS server responses for the domain cloud4c.com produced inconsistent results during tests carried out earlier on Thursday.

Italy Downgrades Transparency

For years, AGCOM has published every rightsholder blocking request and then once a decision has been made, published the official response on its website for public scrutiny. It's a transparent system that may ultimately help to hide entire websites but does so while opening up administrative aspects for public scrutiny.

With the introduction of Piracy Shield, decisions are still published, but it seems fairly obvious that information made available to the public represents a mere fraction of action behind the scenes. The image below (translated) shows every blocking order published thus far. Each contains a single domain, so it's clear that at a minimum, hundreds of IP addresses are going unreported, with last weekend a prime example.

piracy shield orders

The biggest problem is that IP addresses make up the bulk of the blocking while also producing the most errors. These errors can be devastating for innocent parties that unwittingly end up as collateral damage. Yet with no open reporting, holding perpetrators to account – if only to improve the system – could prove all but impossible.

Any argument in favor of secrecy necessarily fails, since IPTV providers know before anyone else that their IP addresses are being blocked. That means those privy to the details of IP address blocking include AGCOM, rightsholders, ISPs, and pirate IPTV providers.

The only people kept in the dark are those who become collateral damage through no fault of their own.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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