After years of negotiating and planning the “six-strikes” Copyright Alert System finally went live in February.
The Copyright Alert System’s main goal is to educate the public. People are informed that their connection is being used to share copyrighted material without permission, and told where they can find legal alternatives.
These alerts start out friendly, but repeat infringers face a temporary disconnection from the Internet, or another mitigation measure.
The program has not yet shared how many people have been warned thus far or how many have been punished. Since these statistics are not available we decided to look at another set of data to evaluate the effectiveness of the copyright alerts.
Ideally, the warnings should stop people from downloading copyrighted content through sites such as The Pirate Bay, resulting in a drop in visitors. However, half a year has passed since the introduction of the six-strikes scheme, and U.S Pirate Bay traffic appears to be unaffected.
The Pirate Bay shared its U.S. traffic statistics with TorrentFreak and the graph below shows how it developed since early 2011. The y-axis starts at an arbitrary point (we were asked not to disclose the full numbers) but it provides plenty of insights nonetheless.
One of the first data points that stands out is the huge spike in traffic during March this year, the first full month after the Copyright Alert System started. Instead of a decline in traffic, The Pirate Bay nearly broke a record number of page views that month, only trailing behind September 2012.
Compared to March 2012, the increase in page views is 31%, and compared to March 2011 this goes up to 113%.
Pirate Bay traffic
Not pictured in the graph but well worth mentioning, is that February 25 was at that point the best day in terms of traffic for 2013. Perhaps not a coincidence, as this was the day the Copyright Alert System began.
Perhaps all the talk about piracy in the mainstream press piqued the interest of new users?
After the big jump during March this year there was a slight drop in traffic, but the number of page views generated by U.S. visitors was still higher than last year. We should note that the growth rate in 2013 has been slower compared to the year before, but the 2012 pattern is an exception in the bigger picture most likely resulting from the Megaupload shutdown.
So as not to rely on one data source, TorrentFreak also asked ExtraTorrent to share some details on their United States traffic. One of the site’s operators informed us that there are no significant changes in the percentage of U.S. visitors, which floats around 15 percent.
Only time will tell how the number of U.S visits to torrent sites will develop over time. In any case, it is safe to conclude that the six-strikes scheme has thus far failed to encourage a clear decline in Pirate Bay traffic. If anything, it caused a temporary bump in visitors.
Contrary to the above, in 2011 the French three-strikes law caused a 29% decrease in visits to P2P “pirate” sites. Why “six-strikes” has not caused a dent in Pirate Bay’s traffic is hard to explain without further details. It could be that the number of notices is still relatively low, or perhaps pirates are harder to “educate” than expected.
