Baywatch: Two approaches to measure the effects of blocking access to The Pirate Bay

•Since 2012, Dutch Internet Service Providers have to block access to The Pirate Bay.•We study the effect on BitTorrent traffic and downloading from illegal sources.•Consumer surveys and a non-infringing tool for BitTorrent Monitoring are used.•No impact is found on the percentage of the population downloading from illegal sources.

In the fight against unauthorised sharing of copyright protected material, Dutch Internet Service Providers have been summoned by courts to block their subscribers' access to The Pirate Bay and related sites. This paper studies the effectiveness of this approach towards online copyright enforcement, using both a consumer survey and a newly developed non-infringing technology for BitTorrent monitoring. While a small group of respondents download less from illegal sources or claim to have stopped doing so, no impact is found on the percentage of the Dutch population downloading from illegal sources. Slight changes are found on the distribution of Dutch peers, but these seem related to the awareness raised by blocking rather than the blocking itself.