[E]fforts to simply eradicate piracy by shutting down sites can’t work. The internet moves too quickly, and has unlimited space for infringing sites to hide. This is a very strong admission for an industry-funded report, and one that shows the extrajudicial DNS blocking that SOPA would allow can’t work. Never mind the censorship concerns—killing websites that host infringing material, unwittingly or not, won’t kill piracy. That on its own runs counter to the prevailing refrain in the copyright lobby. But what’s even more surprising is that the report offers an actual solution, as Techdirt adroitly pointed out: If you want to combat piracy, make your content available elsewhere.

Jerry Brito analyzes an MPAA study blaming search engines for enabling mass piracy:

[It’s] not surprising that, according to the report, 58% of all visits to infringing URLs that were “influenced” by a search engine came from queries for either generic or title-based terms, not from the more-clearly suspicious “domain” terms. As the report points out, this “indicat[es] that these consumers did not display an intention of viewing content illegally.”

So the question is, why did these consumers who had no illegal intent end up at infringing sites? Could it be that they did not have a legal alternative to accessing the content they were seeking? That would not excuse their behavior, and it’s the movie industry’s prerogative whether and when to make their content available. Indeed release windows are part of its business model, although a business model seemingly in tension with consumer demand as evidenced by the shrinking theatrical release window. That all said, it’s not clear to me why search engines should be in the business of ensuring other industries’s business models remain unchanged.