Four Years In, How Successful Has Hollywood's Attack On The Pirate Bay Been?

from the not-very... dept

TorrentFreak alerts us to the news that May 31st was the four year anniversary of the raid that took down The Pirate Bay. So it seems worth checking in to see how well that went. As you may recall, right after the raid happened (very much because of MPAA pressure), the MPAA put out a statement, insisting that this raid was a huge victory for the MPAA:

"The actions today taken in Sweden serve as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves," said Dan Glickman, Chairman & CEO of the MPAA. "Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet."

Of course, Glickman was overstating things just a bit. The raid did not stop The Pirate Bay from continuing anything. In fact, the raid merely took the site down for a couple days, but the publicity from the raid massively increased visitors to the site. I have to admit that, at the time of the raid, I'd never heard of The Pirate Bay myself. Since then, of course, there have been multiple attempts to take the site down, all of which have failed. The latest of which resulted in the Swedish Pirate Party taking on hosting duties for the site.

And, of course, there's the infamous lawsuit. While it did result in guilty verdicts against four people associated with the site, it hasn't stopped the site from operating at all, and recent attempts to collect money from the defendants in the lawsuit have mostly turned up nothing. While it's a bit disturbing that the entertainment industry was able to hand the fines over to debt collectors while the case is still on appeal, those debt collectors have only been able to seize $30,000 of the over $6 million owed -- and all of it's from Carl Lundstrom, who was only loosely associated with the site in the first place.

It really does make you wonder why the MPAA and the RIAA have bothered with all of this. It hasn't even remotely slowed file sharing down. In fact, their actions have helped advertise The Pirate Bay worldwide and made those running it into celebrities. And, even if they eventually do shut down the site, a dozen others will quickly step up to take its place. At some point, you have to wonder when they will realize it's time to figure out ways to focus on building a better business model rather than trying to do the impossible and deny what technology allows.

It has been completely counter productive. It has meant that even more people know know about bit torrent, and what is there. If they had not gone all crazy over Wolverine then millions would not have heard about it and downloaded it.

Yes but the wolverine download may have got millions to the cinema to see the differences. I certainly went to see it for just that reason. I may have just waited till it gets onto terrestrial if the review were bad.

That's precisely what I was getting at

Yes but the logic of the studios will be that those that downloaded will not see the film. Which may not be true at all. Bit torrent can be a great form of marketing, and probably a lot cheaper. They will treat the download as lost sales, which will only be true if it were a complete turkey.