LOS ANGELES—A study by Carnegie Mellon University published this month has attempted to develop empirical evidence on the extent to which search engine results influence "consumer piracy choices." The study was conducted, according to its abstract, as part of an "ongoing public policy debate regarding the role search engines can play in the fight against intellectual property theft." The first order of business, it was determined, was to find out if search engines do in fact have a significant level of influence on consumer behavior regarding piracy.
"To do this," continued the abstract, "we [designed] a customized search engine that allows us to experimentally manipulate pirated and legal links in users’ search results. We then [conducted] separate experiments on a general population of users and on college-aged users where we randomly assign users to a control condition or to separate treatment conditions where infringing sites or legal sites are artificially promoted in the search results."
The results, as acknowledged by TorrentFreak, were "very strong," and indicated that search engines do indeed exert significant influence on consumer behavior.
"Of all participants who saw the standard results," reported Ernesto for TorrentFreak, "80% chose to buy the movie via a legal option. This went up to 94% if the results were mostly legal, and dropped to 57% for the group who saw mostly infringing results on the first page."
The site also contacted Professor Rahul Telang, one of the authors of the study, who reiterated that the study findings indicate that the influence of search engines like Google and others is direct in nature, and can actually lead consumers to either pirate a movie or not.
“Prominence of legal versus infringing links in the search results seem to play a vital role in users decision to consume legal versus pirated content," he told the site. "In particular, demoting infringing links leads to lower rate of consumption of pirated movie content in our sample."
He added, with obvious emphasis, “The results suggest that the search engines may play an important role in fight against intellectual property theft."
The abstract itself describes the study's findings thusly: "Our data show that relative to the non-manipulated (control) condition, the presence of pirate or legal links in search results strongly influences the behavior of both the general and college-aged populations: users are more likely to choose a legal option to acquire the movie when legal sites are promoted, and users are more likely to choose a pirate option when piracy links are promoted. By analyzing users’ initial search terms, we also find evidence that users who initially intend to pirate are more likely to purchase legally when legal links are promoted and that users who initially intend to consume legally are more likely to pirate when pirate links are promoted. Together our results suggest that reducing the prominence of pirated links can be a viable policy option in the fight against intellectual property theft."
TorrentFreak adds as caveats that the researchers received a "generous donation" from the RIAA, and also notes, "As a word of caution the researchers point out that meddling with search results in the real world may be much more challenging. False positives could lead to significant social costs and should be avoided, for example."
But it also concedes, "The MPAA and RIAA will welcome the study as a new piece of research they can wave at Google and lawmakers. Whether that will help them to get what they want has yet to be seen though."
