Meh, So, what if I just downloaded one song off of the internet for free. That hurts nobody, no one needs to know. The diva makes millions of bucks anyway. A loss of few bucks just means peanuts to her!
Why should I spend my hard-earned cash on movie tickets? When I can access them from the comfort of my home with just a few clicks?
Online piracy is perceived as a victimless crime; something that absolutely hurts no one. This is quite obvious, a shallow argument. Online piracy is a crime. Pirating content is illegal because it results in a lost sale for the copyright owner be it movies, series, games, shows, videos, music, or books. It’s illegal because it deprives the content creator of his rightful dues for all the efforts that he/she and the team have put in.
FACTS & FIGURES:
Illegal streaming services account for more than 80% of global online piracy.
Online pirated videos receive 230 billion views in a year
Piracy websites received 130.5 billion visits in the year 2020
India ranks 4th amongst the top 10 countries with 5.6 billion visits for online piracy sites.
According to the estimates, the Indian film industry loses about Rs. 22,000 crores and 60,000 jobs in a year due to online piracy.
Book publishers incur a loss of Rs 400 crores every year.
20-25% of books sold in India are pirated.
How does online piracy occur?
Leakage of original content: In the case of music, series, or movies, an insider from the team who has access to original content would resort to leaking original content and sell it for a lesser price in the market.
Recording movies in theatres: Some people resort to recording the entire movie and sell them illegally. Although the sound quality and video quality are quite bad in a normal recording, it still gets sold in the market as it is watchable.
Stream recording: People also record live streams of certain movies through screen recording devices and sell them. With the help of software online, pirates use DVD and Blu-ray discs to record original content.
Why does online piracy occur?
One of the biggest reasons for online piracy is the inherent reluctance to pay and watch. People want everything for free, and websites like bit torrent, media max and traditional PFP applications only make it easier.
Some people resort to illegal downloading; simply because they cannot afford it due to financial troubles.
Other people pirate content to make a profit by reselling.
With the help of pirated content, hackers infect devices by spreading viruses and trojans.
A lot of people fail to understand that online piracy is theft which makes it illegal.
The outcome of online piracy
Companies involved in pirating illegal software are susceptible to infringements and copyright violations. The Indian constitution has a copyright act of 1957, under section 13, which protects all literary works, musical works, artistic works, dramatic works, sound recordings and cinematograph films. As per the cinematograph act of 2019, the government of India punishes individuals who resort to illegally recording movies without the written consent of producers. The penalty is a jail term of up to 3 years and a fine of Rs. 10 lakhs.
Apart from legal trouble, they also make themselves vulnerable to viruses and malware when they expose their networks and individual devices. The infected systems create an opportunity for hackers to install ransomware or malware. Downloading from torrent comes with its own risk because the ones who download are selling as well. A public IP address makes it easy to track.
How to stop online piracy
The only way to protect yourself from online piracy is to stop downloading content for free.
Avoid purchasing software from sellers who insist on making backup copies.
Ensure that the software products are authentic and consist of manuals, license, warranties and service policies.
Check for seals and holograms on CDs or DVDs you purchase.
Contact the experts
Aiplex prides itself in being India’s first antipiracy company with more than 12+ years of domain expertise. It has helped take down infringed content across various platforms, verify over a million URLs, detect fake websites and eradicate unlicensed content for over 200+ content owners.
The piracy audience is often superfans who have a very direct, engaging, and obsessive relationship with the content he/she watches. They go to great lengths to search, find, illegally stream or download content. These are valuable high-intent customers that consume content but do not pay for content as of yet.
AiPlex Business Research-Audience Insights
Over the past 12+ years, we have been monitoring and tracking trillions of visits, views, and downloads of pirated content. AiPlex Business Research team continues to build an exhaustive database and an unparalleled understanding of fan behavior. This data offers rich and predictive insights into content demand and consumption. It gives you actual data on demand for your content; you can formulate content strategies and customer acquisition around this data.
Digital Marketing for Content Owners
The content protection team has found a great ally in the digital marketing team of AiPlex Digital. The SEO experts, social media superstars, online advertisement gurus have all joined hands in researching keywords, competitor analysis, behavioral targeting, search engine traffic, Google analytics, etc.
Monetizing Piracy-Value-Addition from our Anti Piracy Solutions
We have a very counter-intuitive product for you. As an anti-piracy company, while we protect your content successfully against all sorts of piracy, our business research product will give actionable insights to your marketing and distribution teams. In essence, there is a large unmonetized audience for your content. In order for you to monetize this demand for content, AiPlex will share data that can be used to predict which territories and regions have an unsatiated demand for your content way ahead of the release date. Digital advertising campaigns can be targeted at these audience segments.
We Have Heard Good Things
We have already rolled out our product to a select group of our long-term customers. The feedback has been great and there is a great deal of excitement. Our data is being used by these customers to plan releases, pricing, and distribution strategies, implement both offline and digital marketing strategies; internationally, as well as, regionally with remarkable success.
To find about more about how AiPlex Business Research & Audience Insights can help you with your marketing and distribution strategy,please drop us a line.
What we are witnessing now is not only a spurt in piracy but an unheard-of sophistication and complexity with which content is pirated, distributed, and monetized. Online piracy is a full-fledged parallel industry; its bigger, bolder, innovative, and definitively more lucrative than it ever was.
Today’s pirate is no more that loner, nerdy teenager from some godforsaken place sharing movies and popular shows on torrents just for the thrills. It is an organized criminal network running highly profitable businesses by using sophisticated technology.
They are causing serious damage: By 2023, video piracy is expected to cost $67 billion in economic losses globally. They’re poaching audiences, bleeding legitimate businesses, and putting at risk individuals too.
Conventionally, anti piracy companies have fought piracy with methods like DMCA notifications, ISP blocking, copyright enforcement, court orders, etc. Yes, these methods are efficient but then new challenges require new approaches.
What is intelligence-driven approach to piracy?
Intelligence-driven approach to anti piracy is this new approach. It uses insights from technology‑driven data and data gathered by AiPlex cybersecurity specialists.
They answer very elementary but crucial questions.
How is your content being pirated at the moment?
How is your content likely to be pirated in the future?
What is that you should do to plug these vulnerabilities?
Intelligence-driven approach in action
One of the most popular OTT platforms in India, a big powerhouse, approached us to help them with piracy. Our team used machine learning, behavioral data, and an in-house blacklist of rogue IPTV services to identify 38 illegal IPTV services that were piggybacking on the popularity of our client and stealing our client’s content. We used our own patented methods and identified the source of the leaks and shared it with the client for legal and other remedial actions. We used our conventional methods (including collaborating with payment gateways) to disrupt their services. Most of them (32 of them to be precise) had to shut shop and other had to move away. 78% reduction in piracy was the happy outcome. This was a major validation of how intelligence-driven approach together with our conventional methods could give us that edge in fighting digital piracy.
Intelligence-driven anti piracy can help you dominate search results
Every day, users perform billions of searches through search engines, websites, and social media. This is how your customers find you, but unfortunately the same search engines and platforms also index and show pirated content from torrents, cyber lockers, and streaming sites.
Keeping search results clean is more important than ever, especially for a content company.
AiPlex uses search analysis and keyword research to identify copyright infringements in each search. We then enforce copyright and delist infringing search results. Obviously, driving traffic to licensed and paid-for content. If you need a proven content protection solution that is futuristic and stood the test of time for over a decade now, drop us a line, we will customize an anti piracy solution best suited for your needs.
