Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, pursuant to the Answer of 2 August 2016 to Question 42624, what the evidential basis is for the conclusion that a decrease in the prominence of copyright infringing websites in search engine results has resulted in a decrease in infringement.

Publically available research from industry clearly shows a decrease in traffic to the most high profile Bit Torrent indexing websites following changes to search engine algorithms to demote websites which have been the subject of large numbers of copyright infringement notices. While it is not possible to say exactly how this equates to changes in infringement, traffic levels to these websites are likely to be highly correlated with levels of infringing activity.

The work of the Ministerial roundtable group on search and copyright is supported by research from OFCOM, which gives the group a periodic snapshot of the prominence of copyright infringing websites in search results for various search terms.