There is always another Way to Download

     

Peter Sunde, co-founder,

Pirate Bay

Mark Jackson report to ISPreview that "One of the country’s largest broadband ISPs has revealed that the recent censorship of The Pirate Bay website has had only a short-lived impact upon overall P2P file sharing traffic, with data volumes dipping 11% immediately after the ban before returning “pretty much back to where they were before“.

See "UK ISPs Ordered to Block Pirate Bay" (here) for background on the censorship, as well as what the UK regulator, Ofcom thinks of web blocking ("Ofcom: "All site blocking techniques can be circumvented" - [The Leaked Document]"- here).

It is not clear if users accessed Pirate Bay or other site/s to reach copyrighted material, or used P2P for other file transfers.

Mark explain that "In fairness it should be said that ISPs generally only keep a very vague record of overall network activity, which cannot identify precisely what type of files are being transferred over P2P networks (legal, unlawful or illegal content etc.). As a result it’s difficult to know what the real impact has been, although users of such content tend to switch over to a different site or simply work their way around the block itself. In any case overall P2P traffic, which was the primary focus of The Pirate Bay, appears not to have suffered".

See "Big UK ISP Claims the The Pirate Bay Block Had Little Impact on P2P Traffic" - here.