Surprise: Advocates of the so-called “six strikes” anti-piracy policy are calling it a smashing success but aren’t releasing any data to back up their claims. For those of you who need a refresher, the six strikes policy was a new plan pushed by copyright advocates on ISPs that essentially gives users up to six different notices or warnings after they download pirated content before throttling their Internet speeds or blocking their access to certain websites. The program was hit with multiple delays since its inception and critics have said that it’s completely impossible to enforce fairly in buildings with shared connections.
Nonetheless, Karl Bode at DSL Reports writes that copyright advocates are hailing six strikes as a major success that has dealt a serious blow to Internet users who pirate copyrighted material. The Center for Copyright Information, for example, says that “a national effort to crack down on Internet piracy through a ‘six strikes’ system is seeing success” and that “fears about the system were misplaced.” Bode notes that BitTorrent traffic has been basically unchanged since the launch of six strikes, which suggests that it’s done little to dissuade content pirates from downloading content through their favorite file-sharing protocol.
“It’s worth noting that many BitTorrent users have simply migrated to VPNs and proxies to dodge the watchful eye of their ISPs, which could show up as a piracy reduction in CCI’s numbers,” Bode writes, while adding that this is “assuming any actual statistics ever get released.”
