European investigation: closing illegal download sites is of little use

Taking sites that offer illegal content, such as torrent sites, offline has little effect in the long term. It can even cause fragmentation, which makes taking action against these sites more difficult. This is apparent from a study carried out on behalf of the European Commission.

Scientists from the Joint Research Center of the European Commission conducted the study. They published the results in March, but the investigation was not publicized until Friday. The findings show that taking sites that offer illegal content offline makes little sense.

The researchers looked at the consequences of the downing of Kino.to, a German streaming website that disappeared in 2011. Kino.to offered a large number of links to video streams of movies. The site targeted German-speaking Internet users, but was hosted in Russia. Kino.to itself did not host any video streams.

The surfing behavior of five thousand anonymous Germans shows that taking Kino.to offline initially led to a decrease in visits to piracy sites on an individual level. This effect was only visible in the short term. It later emerged that the Germans quickly tapped into alternative sources of illegal content, which resulted in the Kino.to taking down to no avail.

The researchers identified a potential danger to lawmakers and executives. “The market structure after the site’s takedown was more fragmented. This potentially makes the market more resilient to future actions,” the scientists write. They claim that the online piracy market is therefore very ‘elastic’. However, the researchers do not mention a countermeasure.

Incidentally, the researchers emphasize that the study was conducted with data from 2011. This means that the results may differ slightly today. For example, in 2011, there were fewer legal alternatives available to the Germans, and they may have therefore been more likely to look for illegal sites. They may also have turned to offline file transfer alternatives.