In our first post about protecting yourself from content piracy, we highlighted that US economic losses from digital piracy being between $40 and $97.1 billion, according to the Global Innovation Policy Center. The entertainment industry suffers the most from this surge in piracy and copyright infringement, as TV takes up the majority of pirated content, with film and sports second - and live streaming adding new complexity.

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On top of that, illegal downloading of copyrighted materials takes up 24% of the global bandwidth, causing latency and other issues for users.

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New reports from research groups Akamai and MUSO revealed that users visited pirate sites a total of 132 billion times in the first months of 2021, a 16% rise over the previous year. 2022 results are already rising and the concern over who will end up paying the cost.

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In film and television, there are hundreds of people involved in each project including production teams, investors, actors, advertisers, studios, and more who are hurt by content piracy. Sports teams face similar challenges, with livestream media pirated more regularly now, matches and events are watched illegally.  

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The Evolving Landscape of Entertainment Piracy

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Issues with piracy, copyright infringement, and hesitancy to head back to the theater in the wake of the pandemic have led several companies to reassess their release strategies. Whether releasing on streaming and theaters the same day, timing international releases differently, or changing affiliations with networks - the conversation about piracy is present in every movie release now.

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The reality is that people who were stuck at home during the pandemic were also facing economic pressures, and many didn’t want to spend extra money to catch up on TV shows and movies – but they did need something to do. Piracy saw an increase during that time and it didn’t stop once COVID restrictions were lifted. Italy, who went into lockdown first, saw a 66% increase in visits to pirated sites at the onset of the pandemic, with numbers still not returning to pre-pandemic levels.

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Contributing to the problem, the growing number of streaming services means favorite shows and films are spread across several platforms, requiring paid subscriptions and logins for each. The same companies have made streaming available everywhere, and its pervasive nature makes it easier to pirate content and to share it across the many social media platforms that consumers have available.

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For movies and TV, studies have shown that the majority of piracy happens now when movies are released for on-demand viewing, with theater releases for films seeing smaller spikes in pirated content. Armed with this knowledge, entertainment companies must plan ahead, putting together a piracy plan of action before releasing their content.

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Developing an Effective Piracy Action Plan

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A good piracy action should include ways to:

• Monitor for instances of piracy
• Prioritization of the pirates sites
• Considerations for copyright infringement, threats, or other issues related to the content
• Options for enforcement or next steps after identifying the sites or authors of the content

When monitoring for instances of content piracy online, there are increasing sites and channels to share content, making it harder for companies to continuously spot new violations. To keep an eye on the piracy situation, many companies have previously employed services that used human eyes to try to track down pirated content online. This typically finds 5-8% of pirated content, which continues to shift places - as soon as one site is shut down another pops up from the same thief.

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Technological advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning have allowed companies like Redflag AI to spot content violations constantly. Monitoring not just video content, but text, image, and audio as well - meaning entertainment companies can spot people who are teasing content availability or stealing logos, character likeness, and more.

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Prioritizing Piracy Sites

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Figuring out where and when you should spend time enforcing piracy of your content can be just as difficult as finding the pirated content. In some instances, there are thousands of incidents of piracy per month within millions of views to the infringing sites.

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The majority of pirated content views come from repeat offenders and are shared online by humans and bots, spreading the content in ways that can seem legitimate. Because every pirated view is a view that isn’t bringing the studio, network, advertisers, and thousands of people who worked on the production any revenue - it’s important to spot the biggest players quickly.

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Redflag AI not only monitors for instances of piracy, but also checks out site traffic numbers, followers, shares, likes, and other important data related to the incident so you can make an informed decision about enforcement.

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Challenges: Piracy, Copyrights, and Threats in Entertainment

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Sadly, it’s not just piracy that content is up against on the internet. Copyright infringement, threatening language against actors, sports players, officials, and more are things that happen when content is shared online. And whether it’s on a site that you’re okay with or a pirated site, you should know.

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That means you need to be able to monitor comments and surrounding content to see the full context of your content on the web. The millions of sites and billions of pages mean without an AI-enabled solution, no person or team could possibly find and respond to all of these instances!

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You've Got Pirated Content... Now What?

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So a tool finds pirated content and prioritizes it, how do you sift through thousands of lines of data to get to a meaningful next step or action plan? If you’re working with Redflag AI, we can summarize your situation, recommend a course of action, and alert you to ongoing changes.

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If you’re doing it on your own, it’s important to come up with a matrix that will help you prioritize your current results and something to continue to surface new ones. With a new site popping up as quickly as an old one is removed, there are always new violations, authors, and channels that need to be checked. Interested in checking out Redflag AI? Set up time for a demo here and we’ll walk you through how this works.