The U.S. "six-strikes" system is now a year old, and the organization responsible for running the system says it has been a huge success.
The person responsible for running the industry-led graduated response program, Jill Lesser from Center for Copyright Information (CCI), says the program has been a success so far. In an interview with The Hill, Lesser says that the "non-punitive" system has shown "early examples of positive feedback".
The graduated response regime, which sees warnings being sent to users for suspected infringing activities, has been tried in other countries, notably in France. The French government recently decided to roll back the program due to its high cost and ineffectiveness in stopping piracy. A recent independent study also found that France's graduated response system did not alter user behavior when it came to pirated downloads.
Lesser, nor the CCI, have provided any evidence so far in terms of statistics, other than that "a large number of alerts" have been delivered. Statistics like how many first and second strikes, compared to fifth or sixth strikes, which could show users heeding the early warnings and reducing or stopping their infringing activities, are notably absent. So are any real world data showing a drop in U.S. piracy rates, or an increase in sales of legal goods.
If anything, U.S. traffic to sites like The Pirate Bay has increased since the introduction of "six-strikes", with many users also flocking to VPN and proxy services to avoid detection.
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