Anti-Piracy Agent Says Full Site Blocking Only Makes His Job Harder

from the total-failures dept

We've pointed out for years that the whac-a-mole game of entertainment industry organizations trying to take down entire websites was a really dumb idea. Not only would it create significant collateral damage for legitimate sites, but it makes things even worse in terms of actually preventing access to content. That's because once the content is out there, it's out there. And as you shut down big sites, you pretty much guarantee that the same content will be just as widely available, but in a more distributed manner, making it that much harder for those focusing on takedowns to be effective. It appears that this is exactly what's happening. Torrentfreak recently pointed out attention to an article by James Brandes, who works for an anti-piracy company, but who says that site takedowns are actually making his job a lot harder.

 So is this wack-a-mole policy working? No. It’s plainly evident that every single time a site is blocked at the ISP level, new URLs take their place. This has further ramifications for content owners and their agents.

 As an anti-piracy agent, I can report that this is making life more difficult particularly with regards to DMCA submissions to Google. But why? During an anti-piracy project, I send Notices to Google to remove infringing results that appear via their search engine. In the past, this may have included results for The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents, & H33T. The major problem now is that whilst infringing search results for the aforementioned torrent sites have been removed by Google, new infringing search results appear constantly as a consequence of these sites being forced to use proxies & alternative URLs. Predictably, this creates far more work for content owners (particularly for small independent labels who are not members of the BPI) and their agents. For example, I’d estimate that well over 5 million additional search results have been removed from Google as a result of sites using alternative URLs. Just check the following Google Transparency for piratebayalternative and you’ll see why I’ve reached this conclusion! So it’s certainly fair to say that the blocking policy is perhaps backfiring badly.

This shouldn't be surprising. Pretty much anyone who has any experience with this kind of thing could have predicted exactly that. And yet, the recording and movie industries keep pushing for site blocking in the completely ridiculous belief that it will actually do something useful.

Filed Under: copyright, james brandes, site takedowns, whac-a-mole