According to recent research, seizing domains from sites which infringe copyright is not the way to stop piracy. Instead, the report suggests that a much more effective strategy would be to target the money that pirated materials and sites generate.
Methods of doing this include targeting the companies that run ads on sites containing copyright infringing material and shaming them into stopping their funding. Another way is to to work with payment processors, including PayPal and credit card processors, to cut off the site’s revenue streams.
The study looked at what it calls one-click hosting (OCH) sites, like Megaupload and Rapidshare, and attempts by copyright holders to have their content taken down if they are hosted illegally.
Looking at the typical effects of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices, millions of which are sent every year, the researchers noticed that there was usually only a weak short-term drop in the relevant files being available before they reappeared elsewhere, which is the start of what they describe as a “cat-and-mouse game between uploaders and copyright owners”.
However, the researchers noted that the “game” seems to be in favour of the many pirates who can provide far more content than the copyright owners are taking down.
This imbalance of powers, together with the size and diversity of the OCH ecosystem, suggests that anti-piracy laws to reduce the availability and accessibility of pirated content may be less successful than their proponents might expect.
Citing the example of the closure of Megaupload, the researchers noted that the number of files being illegally shared around the web hasn’t decreased, but the number of different sites hosting them has in fact rapidly multiplied making enforcement by takedown a harder prospect.
Consequently, hitting piracy sites in the pocket may be the only way to get them to stop.