Pirate Bay block effectiveness short-lived, data suggests

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftonbladet" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftonbladet</a><p>"When it was first published in 1830 by Lars Johan Hierta, it was a tabloid that reported news and also criticised the new Swedish king Charles XIV John. The king stopped Aftonbladet from being printed and banned it. This was answered by starting the new newspaper "Det andra Aftonbladet" (The second Aftonbladet), which was subsequently banned, followed by new versions named in similar fashion until the newspaper had been renamed 26 times, after which it was allowed by the king."<p>I wonder how many times the Pirate Bay has to be "blocked" today for our lawmakers and courts to realize the futility of it?

This amuses me a lot.<p>I've always maintained that people who pirate are generally lazy (including myself) but avid entertainment fans. Piracy offers me convenience, I can sit down and have a film going on my TV within about 15 minutes of opening the torrent<p>As soon as the entertainment industries cotton onto the fact that people demand content that's cheap and convenient to access, I think you'll see a drop in piracy rates. Netflix streaming is a step in the right direction but a very slow one.<p>In fact I'd say that the rate of my nefarious pirating ways has dropped considerably just because Netflix is quicker than pirating and I'm more than happy to pay the subscription fee to get that level of service

The desperation and almost panic is amusing:<p>"The firm stressed that the figures related to the volume of P2P traffic, not necessarily the number of users.<p>This made it possible, it said, that "hardcore" file-sharers might have become more prolific since the ban while casual users have been discouraged."<p>Really? All these weeks later? Oh please.<p>I found out about the ban when one of my kids can down to tell me how to circumvent it. Not the geeky one either. The geeky one snorts at TPB.

Skeptic powers, activate. I'd be surprised if the alleged drop in p2p traffic was something other than natural variance, interpreted by people who expected a drop.

I would love to see a traffic analysis to tpb during these last few weeks compared with theoretical models, that have presumably been developed, to predict how robust the Internet is in general with regard to self-healing/route-around properties.