With piracy ever on the rise, the best publishers can do is to request DMCA takedowns from Google or pursue legal action against those involved in piracy. No wonder multiple cases are already pending in the courts against Z Library and Anna’s Archive, among the most well-known when distributing copyrighted content. With the limited availability of pirated content, the sale of legal copies should witness higher demand. At least, that is what is expected. But do things pan out that way in real life?

As TorrentFreak reported, researchers from the University of Warsaw, Poland too have been intrigued by the same and decided to find out the reality. They started by partnering with some of the biggest publishers and an anti-piracy organization. They aim to find out how takedown requests or other anti-piracy efforts impact the sale of legitimate copies. The research, however, covers only printed books given the limited scale of the e-book market in Poland, but the efforts led to some exciting results, it must be said.

The researchers also adopted a clear and well-thought-out strategy to arrive at a conclusion that can be considered as close to reality as possible. To begin with, a dozen publishers opted to participate in the experiment. The publishers shared titles ranging from 5 to 53 in number. These were then matched against a similar number of titles for which no takedown requests were filed at Google.

The matching was done carefully to ensure the titles matched with those having a similar price, format, and such to ensure a fair comparison. Now, one set of titles could be sold freely, while another set benefited from takedown requests filed for the corresponding pirated versions. The Polish anti-piracy outfit Plagiat. Pl found pirated versions of the titles on 53 sites and issued takedown requests for an entire year.

The next step in the experiment was to find out if such takedown requests were effective. For that, the researchers formed a group comprising three assistants who were asked whether the titles against which takedown requests were filed continued to be available as freely as before. An online search revealed that such titles were more challenging, and fewer copies were available online. Unfortunately, this didn’t contribute to a significant growth in the sale of legal copies.

“We were able to substantially curb the unauthorized distribution, which resulted in a small, positive effect on sales,” the researchers write.

“While using classical analysis, we found it not to be significantly different from zero, a Bayesian approach using previous ‘piracy’ studies to generate a prior led to the conclusion that protecting from piracy resulted in a significant sales boost of about 9 percent.”

The researchers, however, stated the finding might have been different with a bigger sample size, which could have provided a better overall picture of the scenario. The same can be said for e-books, considering pirating an e-book is more accessible than printing a copy. In any case, the research did help answer the pertinent question of how takedown requests or other legal actions against pirated copies affected identical legal versions. What also has to be said is that more research is needed to arrive at a more conclusive result. Let’s hope some other researchers take up from here.