Piracy is a major concern for copyright owners in the digital age. While legislation such as SOPA and PIPA has unsuccessfully attempted to address this issue, a recent study by Sandvine Research indicates that file-sharing activity is on the decline. In fact, this drop is a staggeringly recent phenomenon: over the past six months, BitTorrent, a website that hosts infringing media, has seen a traffic drop from twenty percent to around eight percent.
This trend is representative of the sudden rise and fall of online piracy. After the file-sharing boom, which took off with Napster in the late 1990s, piracy reached its peak in 2004 when file-sharing composed a staggering seventy percent of Internet traffic. This figure diminished to thirty-one percent in 2008, and currently rests below ten percent.
This sudden and steep rise and fall in file-sharing raises both legal and practical questions. First, what external factors account for this drop? The first instinct is to look at users’ behavior to determine why people are suddenly moving away from piracy. Despite the RIAA and MPAA’s campaign against copyright infringement over the course of the past decade, both groups have since abandoned this strategy due to its high costs, and public relations backlash, which were seen as ineffective to stymieing pirating media.
What Sandvine’s findings reveal, however, is that Internet traffic is predominantly devoted to legitimate content providers. Netflix leads the pack, comprising twenty-eight percent of traffic, with YouTube a distant second at seventeen percent. YouTube has had copyright infringement issues in the past, but its take-down policy, in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, has protected the website from certain liabilities and allowed it to flourish into a major content provider. The correlation implies that users who would have otherwise pirated media for free will choose affordable and accessible options hosted by a legitimate source. This indicates that much of the online piracy issue was an economic concern (as oppose to a political statement), and that market solutions are more effective than legal ones to combat online piracy.
These findings also present legal concerns. Recently, Wikileaks released documents on a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, concerning U.S. and international intellectual property issues. The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that though the agreement is just a draft, it would strengthen copyright protections in the contracting nations, as well as the U.S.
While there is nothing wrong with copyright protection in itself, there is the possibility of overprotecting what should otherwise be a temporary monopoly. Likewise, many concerns over strengthening copyright protection stem from concerns over online piracy. However, if the issue itself is waning and the solution lies in the market, not the law, it is questionable what the strengthening protections would actually accomplish. Indeed, these findings may shift the copyright debate, and it will be interesting to see how strong copyright and weak copyright advocates will incorporate these findings in future debates. Still, this trend represents a major victory for copyright owners who stand to profit from licenses and advertisements on legitimate content hosting sites.