Russian Site-Blocking Leads To An Explosion In 'Pirate' Sites, Tiny Dip In Piracy

Over the past couple of years, we've discussed Russia putting in what is supposed to be an extreme site-blocking policy, in part to curb piracy. There has been a fair amount of mostly anecdotal evidence that has suggested that the video pirate market in Russia has actually increased during this time, while there is very concrete evidence as to the insane amount of collateral damage that the site-blocking policy has caused. Some found this puzzling, but new data out of Russia suggests that the effects on piracy are muted at least in part because of an explosion in new piracy sites or mirrors of blocked sites.

For example, the company says that in 2017, the number of torrent sites offering content to the Russian market sat at around 1,300. However, last year - in the face of overwhelming blocking measures - that number grew to around 2,000.

In 2018, torrent sites accounted for just over a fifth of the 'pirate' market (streaming platforms dominate with more than 70%) but due to multiple links to the same content appearing on most platforms, torrent links accounted for around 40% of the available links to pirated material. Further underlining the importance of torrents, despite a smaller share of the market, the company reports that in 87% of cases, the first public copies of premiere titles appeared on torrent sites first, before spreading out to other platforms such as streaming and hosting sites.

Meanwhile, the number of streaming sites increased slightly as well. The report also notes that over all traffic to so-called pirate sites in Russia has "dipped slightly", causing something of a victory cry to come from the content industries with offerings in the country as, I suppose, the overall per-capita, per-site-available piracy rate fell. But, for such a draconian regime, huge amounts of collateral damage coupled with an increase in pirate sites and a tiny drop in traffic to those sites, this isn't exactly a glowing review.

So of course Russia is doubling down on it.

Meanwhile, Russia is further investing in site-blocking with the introduction of a new system. Telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor reports that to date, 660 large telecoms operators have switched to a new mechanism which allows sites to be blocked more efficiently.

"The new mechanism allows service providers to receive data from the Unified Registry [national blacklist] for only updated or changed entries instead of downloading the entire data set," Roscomnadzor reports.

This may, again, show a slight increase in the Russian government's effectiveness in its arms race against filesharing sites, but this isn't going to change the fundamental reality that site-blocking is apparently barely effective, with disastrous results for far too many innocent sites.