Methinks any and all statistical measure of piracy in the UK will still go UP this year. In fact, I'd bet on it if I could be bothered.
I can see where the courts are coming from - this is illegal and can't be condoned - but tail-chasing exercises while record companies are still making record profits each years seems a bit silly. Of course you have to do something with the legal framework but it's all a bit pointless and won't change the way the industry records piracy (i.e. everything we didn't sell on a title we wanted to shift 50m units must have been a pirate, no matter the quality or the available data).
I don't pirate, myself, but it's going to increase again. And why would I pirate the junk that they show? I haven't been to the cinema in 5+ years, because it's all junk, and vastly overpriced. You could let me in for free most nights and I still wouldn't bother to go. I re-buy 20+ year old series on DVD to have something decent to watch and not have to worry about the DRM, because everything else is tripe. Even the new stuff I like (e.g. Not Going Out, etc.) I wait for the DVD or just watch on iPlayer. I don't even buy music - never have - because I don't listen to it except by accident if someone else puts a radio on or something.
Yet I still could spend hundreds or even thousands a year on the right media, and the right quality material, if it were available. Still could spend hours in cinemas eating high-markup popcorn if there was anything worth watching at a sensible price (you have to compete with DVD's, games and TV that work out to significantly less than £1 / hour over their lifetimes). Still could be telling all my pals about the film I just saw, etc. I do still spend buckets on games (mostly indie now because the AAA's are thoughtless eye candy). If there was ANYTHING worth doing that for or any way to do it sensibly, I'd be doing it. But there isn't, and I'm not a pirate, do I spend an awful lot of money ELSEWHERE. They count that as "loss of earnings" and pour the rest of their profit into lawsuits rather than content and yet still next year the problem will get worse again (by their reckoning).
Until you realised this, please carry on chasing your tails, media-industries. Here's hoping after about 20-30 shutdowns like this, people just get pissed with the "big 5" ISP's (the only ones required to put this block in place) and move elsewhere instead, or the ISP's and courts get bored with piracy STILL increasing after they've supposedly put measures in place to curtail it (which means the measures are worthless and hence not worth the court's time to implement).
Circumventing this block is seriously as simple as using an ISP that doesn't have it, or any of a million and one more "technical" workarounds.
But I *GUARANTEE* you that next year piracy rates will still rise again. Because the problem is not the pirate, and not the "free" price.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
