Piracy’s dying: why we’re all going straight

Back in 2007, Steve Jobs wrote that digital rights-management systems “haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy”.

He was right, but something has worked. In the past year or so, traffic to the most notorious “dodgy” download sites – The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent – has nosedived.

The Pirate Bay, which started 2013 as the most popular torrent site on the web, and was rated as the 73rd most visited site in the world, has been forced to change its domain name for the sixth time within a year and now attracts less than a fifth of the traffic it was receiving in 2012.

“For the first time in well over a decade, 2014 may not be the year of the pirate,” says Dr David Price, director of piracy analysis at domain-registration firm NetNames.

For the first time in well over a decade, 2014 may not be the year of the pirate

So what is responsible for this swing away from piracy? Have people been won over by the DRM-free digital downloads that Jobs’ 2007 memo was cajoling the rights-holders into? Has the vast improvement in the availability and timeliness of TV shows on services such as Netflix curbed the temptation to fire up BitTorrent? Or is the decline in popularity down to the fact that ISPs have been forced to block access to the leading piracy sites?

Plummeting piracy

If piracy were a legitimate business, you’d be well advised to cash in your shares now, judging by traffic to the leading BitTorrent sites. Several sources have shown that traffic to some of the web’s most notorious destinations is dying more rapidly than characters in Game of Thrones.

In November 2013, bandwidth-management company Sandvine reported a 20% drop in US BitTorrent traffic over the previous six months, although European traffic continued to grow. The UK is showing a similar drop-off to America, according to figures collated by NetNames.

It has recorded the number of unique visitors to The Pirate Bay falling from five million in 2012 to only 900,000 at the end of 2013. KickassTorrents has seen a similar decline, after a court order forced Britain’s leading broadband providers to block access to the site in February 2013.

Of course, there are plenty of mirrors and proxies to the top torrent sites. A Google search for “Pirate Bay” actually returns a proxy site as the top result, above The Pirate Bay itself. Yet, even with such an easy path around the ISPs’ roadblocks, file-sharing traffic is in decline in the UK.

“Some users have found ways around the blocks,” says NetNames’ Dr Price. “A range of proxy sites are available, and some users have turned to VPNs to circumvent issues, but even when these are accounted for in the analysis, the number of visitors from the UK to major BitTorrent portals has dropped by around 10-20%.”

There’s no doubt that the leading torrent websites are suffering. Of the first five in TorrentFreak’s ten most popular torrent sites of 2013 – compiled at the beginning of the year based on their Alexa rank – The Pirate Bay is in free fall; had to repeatedly change domain names; Torrentz has seen a slight improvement in its Alexa ranking despite being blocked by British ISPs; isoHunt.com now carries a warning message saying it has been “permanently shut down” by a US federal court for copyright violation – although a clone site using the .to domain lives on; and ExtraTorrent has been blocked by British ISPs and seen its worldwide Alexa rank slip from 279 to 1,072.

(Update 24 March: it appears that the changes to TorrentFreak and ExtraTorrent’s Alexa rankings could be explained by the sites temporarily switching domains.)

Despite the wavering fortunes of those at the top of its list, TorrentFreak’s founder, Ernesto Van Der Sar, says that users are simply finding alternatives, as they always have done in the fast-moving world of file-sharing.

“The Pirate Bay blockades may have some effect, but I believe this is marginal,” he says. “People who want to pirate can still reach The Pirate Bay through proxy sites, move over to a different torrent site, or use other file-sharing services.”

Victory for the rights-holders?

Naturally, the rights-holders – who have spent tens, if not hundreds, of millions of pounds on court orders that force ISPs to block access to such sites – believe their campaign of attrition has been a success.

“We find that where the courts direct sites to be blocked, there can be a significant fall-off in traffic and levels of infringing activity; although, of course, some of the slack may be taken up elsewhere, including through proxy sites,” a spokesperson for the record industry trade group, the BPI, told PC Pro. “But the overall impact is a beneficial one, and therefore worth pursuing, as is the ongoing campaign to persuade the likes of Google and other search engines not to promote links to infringing sites over legal ones.”

The decline in BitTorrent is very likely due to the greater availability of decent online services

Is it possible that some of the people who may previously have downloaded content from sites such as The Pirate Bay weren’t aware it was illegal, but have now seen the error of their ways after reading the warning messages posted on blocked sites?

Sky Broadband customers attempting to reach a court-blocked site are given a link to a help page, which explains that “taking effective action against online piracy and copyright infringement” will ensure that “consumers continue to benefit from TV programmes, movies and music both now and in the future”.

Yet civil-liberties groups think it’s unlikely that many would-be downloaders would be put off by ISP roadblocks or Sky’s message from atop the moral high ground.

“The decline in BitTorrent is very likely due to the greater availability of decent online services,” says the executive director of the Open Rights Group, Jim Killock. “Whatever disruption censorship measures may make, they can only hope to push infringers around, while commercial services can reduce illicit copying by providing something better.”

Legal rights

It was only seven years ago that Steve Jobs wrote his then-almost-fanciful “Thoughts on Music” memo, urging his readers to “imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats.

In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players.” Now, Jobs’ vision has become the norm. Where in 2007 it was almost impossible to download music that wasn’t encased in DRM, now it’s almost impossible to find files still protected in this way.

Without DRM, Jobs argued, “the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players”. Sure enough, we’ve seen the launch of Spotify, Deezer, We7, Xbox Music, Google Play Music and all manner of other digital music outlets.

Where music companies once wanted us to buy CDs and then purchase the same music again if we wanted it on our MP3 players, Amazon recently gifted a free set of MP3s to customers for every CD they had bought since 1999. Order a CD now on Amazon, and you can download the MP3s before the disc has even left the depot.

Not treating customers like potential thieves has paid off. The 2013 annual report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) states that: “the global trade value of the recorded music industry grew by 0.3% in 2012 – the best result since 1998 and a sign that the improvement in market conditions seen in 2011 has been sustained”.

Music piracy hasn’t gone away – the IFPI report extrapolates Nielsen and comScore data to estimate that a third of all internet users still “regularly access unlicensed sites” – but the music industry has devised ways to earn revenue from unauthorised uploads, too. Where once it might have sent takedown notices for music uploaded to YouTube, for example, it now – in many cases – takes a cut on advertising sold alongside the videos.

Breaking bad practices

Have other digital entertainment industries followed music’s lead? Not necessarily. Movies, games and ebooks are still routinely sold with copy protection, although they’ve found other ways to satisfy those who may otherwise seek to pirate their content.

Few have done more to meet file-sharers halfway than Netflix. Realising one of the major causes of piracy isn’t a desire to infringe, but merely a desire to see content that has already been aired and is generating internet buzz in the US, Netflix released new episodes of the highly addictive Breaking Bad only a day after they were broadcast in the US.

Few have done more to meet file-sharers halfway than Netflix

It isn’t only having the latest episodes ready to view that makes Netflix popular; it’s having the back catalogue available, too. When Netflix released the fourth season of Breaking Bad the day before the season five premiere, 50,000 subscribers watched all 13 episodes in a day, according to the company’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos.

Netflix has also tapped that box-set-binge mentality for the release of its own shows. When the company launched its first big-budget series, House of Cards, last year, it made all 13 episodes available for immediate viewing. Like those downloading from the torrent sites, House of Cards viewers could gorge on the show in one sitting, rather than waiting a week for another hour-long episode.

Netflix’s data shows that half of the viewers who watch a season of up to 22 episodes will do so within a week. The company has changed the way we consume television, and it’s reaping the rewards: launched only two years ago in this country, Netflix now accounts for more than a fifth of downstream traffic for selected British ISPs, according to Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report.

Netflix isn’t the only company tempting people away from piracy with compelling new services, of course. Sky and Virgin Media, for instance, have both revamped their set-top boxes to offer catch-up services such as BBC iPlayer, 4oD and ITV Player, making the scheduled airing of a TV show less relevant.

Sky airs series such as Game of Thrones the night after it’s broadcast in the US, and makes past series available via its downloadable box-sets facility, which can be watched through the TV and via dedicated smartphone and tablet apps, heading off common reasons to pirate content. Virgin Media, meanwhile, has embedded Netflix into its set-top box.

Much cheaper options are appearing for those who can’t stretch to a Sky or Virgin Media subscription, too. The plug-in-and-play Now TV box from Sky costs £10, and offers a range of on-demand content and TV channels for reasonable subscription fees, plus apps such as iPlayer, Spotify and Facebook.

Google’s Chromecast has just arrived in the UK. The £30 dongle provides access to services such as Netflix, HBO Go and YouTube in the US, and looks set to arrive in this country at some point in 2014.

Why pirate?

The content is there and made available internationally at roughly the same time, and the price is right: Spotify starts from free; Netflix costs a mere £6 per month for unlimited viewing; and the hardware prices have fallen to the point where TV streaming kits are practically being given away. Why even bother pirating the content?

The user experience now provided by Netflix and Spotify surpasses what can be managed through piracy in many areas, something that wasn’t true only two years ago

“The user experience now provided by Netflix and Spotify – and other services such as iPlayer and Last.fm in the UK – surpasses what can be managed through piracy in many areas, something that wasn’t true only two years ago,” says NetNames’ Dr Price.

He has a point. Put a TV programme’s title into Netflix – using a remote control, app or keyboard – and within seconds it’s playing, and ready to resume from where you left off on any other device you might pick up.
Now attempt to download an episode of, say, Breaking Bad on The Pirate Bay. First you have to find a proxy that escapes the blocks imposed by the broadband providers – admittedly, not a difficult task.

Type “Breaking Bad” into the search box, and you’re presented not with a series-by-series listing of the episodes, but a seemingly random list of episodes or full series, all with a list of acronyms such as “x264” accompanying them, which will likely prove bewildering for the average consumer.

Then, when you’ve located the episode you want, you must find a torrent client to download it with. Installing the free BitTorrent client involves a litany of crapware dodging, including toolbars and other associated downloads, and that’s not to mention the pop-up ads, fake download links and other assorted nonsense that litters the pages of the Pirate Bay proxies.

Even once you’ve clicked on the link to download the torrent, popular content will often come down the pipe at no more than a trickle – your ISP may well be choking the traffic at peak times – and there’s no guarantee that the download is what it says it is. The threat of viruses arriving with BitTorrent downloads is an overblown scare tactic employed by the content owners, but it’s far from the click-once, play-anywhere experience offered by Netflix, iTunes and iPlayer.

The file-sharing networks do still have one big advantage, though: there’s almost nothing you can’t find on them, whereas you still won’t find the Beatles on Spotify, or Man of Steel on Netflix. Even if you do hunt them down on a legitimate site somewhere, you’re going to have to pay. You can’t beat free, as the saying goes.

Doing the right thing

Piracy will be with us for some time to come. Although Netflix and YouTube alone are responsible for roughly half the peak-time download traffic in the US, they account for only slightly more than 30% in Europe; BitTorrent is still the third biggest downstream application in Europe, accounting for 10% of download traffic, according to Sandvine.

Yet, as Sandvine reports, it’s the lack of legal alternatives in many European nations that’s the biggest reason for BitTorrent’s ongoing success.

“Based on our observations in this report and previous ones, countries with access to paid services like Netflix or BBC iPlayer typically had a higher share of real-time entertainment traffic on their network,” Sandvine’s report states. “European countries with lower real-time entertainment share typically have higher file-sharing traffic, which has led us to believe that subscribers are likely using applications like BitTorrent to procure audio and video content not available in their region.”

Give people the option to do “the right thing”, and all the evidence suggests they will.