Can blocking piracy sites like The Pirate Bay really curb the rampant illegal download problems? 

The results of a recent study done by a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Wellesley College shows that blocking sites like The Pirate Bay is not enough to stop piracy. 

"Our results show that blocking The Pirate Bay had little impact on consumption through legal channels — instead, consumers seemed to turn to other piracy sites, Pirate Bay 'mirror' sites, or Virtual Private Networks that allowed them to circumvent the block," researchers Brett Danaher, Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang wrote in the abstract of their study titled "The Effect of Piracy Website Blocking on Consumer Behavior" that was published early this month. 

The result is actually not surprising since majority of netizens all over the world continued to download copies of music albums, TV series, films, softwares, as well as other torrent files even after the Swedish police raided the Swedish office of The Pirate Bay in 2006 and took the torrent site down. 

In another news, The Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij has been released from prison early this month after serving two-thirds of his 10-month prison sentence for enabling copyright infringement and being involved with the popular torrent website. Neij was convicted of copyright crime offenses together with his fellow The Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde by a Swedish court in 2009. 

He was supposed to serve his sentence in 2012 but Neij escaped and went to Thailand to hide. But in November 2014, Thai authorities captured him while he was trying to transit between Thailand and Laos, and immediately handed him over to Swedish custody. 

Neij was the last among all The Pirate Bay co-founders who were released from prison because of their copyright crimes. Sunde finished his sentence in November 2014, while Warg is currently serving time in a Dutch prison facility for other unrelated crimes.