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.
It has been 18 years since we started AiPlex Software Pvt. Ltd. As I look back on our journey as a company, it gives me a great sense of pride and satisfaction about what we have accomplished. There have been tremendous successes and also occasional setbacks; however, we have always focussed on doing our best and surged forward.
2019 has been a very successful year for the company on many fronts especially we moving into our own 12,000 sq. ft. N-Cube Centre premises. This newsletter is all about that and the exciting journey ahead.
As you all know, COVID-19, or coronavirus as it is more popularly known, has impacted businesses and humanity worldwide, we are no different, but we are well-equipped to face such challenges.
We are very excited about what 2020 has in store for all of us. This will be a year of growth and unimaginable new opportunities for everyone at AiPlex (Anti Piracy, Digital Marketing, and Online Advertising).
We appreciate your continued commitment to the company. This is that phase, in a company’s trajectory, where each employee has to raise the bar of her / his deliverables and come out with out-of-the-box solutions and initiatives. The only way to do that is to exceed the client’s expectations through innovation and outstanding services. The client should bank on us as their trusted advisor and help us grow our business through repeat business opportunities.
One of the major exciting events in 2019 is our company-owned new office N-Cube Centre, an updated online presence (www.aiplex.com; www.aiplexantipiracy.com; www.aiplexdigital.com; www.aiplexads.com), reinforcing our existing client relationships, streamlining operational processes and our engagement with new prospective clients.
We have built excellent teams in the digital marketing and online advertising department and strengthened our sales team. This will start to yield results in the coming months.
We are continuously improving our culture and work environment, thus creating opportunities for professional and personal growth for our existing employees. At the same time, we are attracting the best talent in the marketplace to fill in new opportunities arising at AiPlex in different verticals.
We hope you enjoyed reading this message from the MD’s Desk, and we look forward to your proactive and constructive efforts in our journey together.
Best wishes to you and your families for a glorious second part of 2020 and beyond.
Digital pirates are keeping up with the times! They use the same technology that OTT and streaming platforms use to distribute unlicensed content. They have built their own ecosystem with cutting-edge technology. Now, all that a pirate needs are a streaming box and a high-speed reliable internet connection.
The days of torrents, cumbersome search for content, painful downloads, and low-quality content have gone. The content is just out there easily accessible, and high quality too.
The only way content owners and anti piracy firms can fight this evolving form of digital piracy is by using computing and machine learning prowess. Effective anti piracy and content protection is near impossible with traditional anti piracy measures. This is where using machine learning to fight digital piracy becomes inevitable.
Fighting digital piracy is all about staying a step ahead of pirates. Using machine learning and data analytics in combination with natural language processing (NLP), keyword searches, etc., (to identify sites hosting pirated and unlicensed content) is a great way to fight digital piracy. Let us understand how!!
What is Machine Learning? How can it be used for fighting Digital Piracy?
Machine Learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence. Machine learning is the ability of systems to automatically process big data and produce reliable and repeatable outcomes. It is based on the concept that machines can learn from data, identify patterns, and perform specific tasks with minimal human intervention. In this case, identifying URLs hosting pirated content. Machine learning can either be supervised or unsupervised.
With respect to fighting digital piracy, supervised machine learning is a better choice as it involves training the machine using data that categorizes URLs as legitimate or illegitimate. It can also be trained to identify piracy hotspots and hosting sites with the highest incidence of piracy and the most likelihood of hosting infringed content.
By crawling the web, the monitoring and detection team effectively compiles an exhaustive database of URLs. Applying various machine learning algorithms, customized to each content type, the URLs are categorized either as legitimate, or illegitimate URLs hosting pirated content. This process typically eliminates approximately 94% of the URLs, and it is usually the remaining 6% URLs that host pirated content.
Since this is a reiterative process, the system progressively becomes efficient and accurate with each reiteration. The anti piracy efforts get laser focussed on eliminating this narrow subset (6% URLs that host pirated content) thus greatly enhancing the effectiveness of anti piracy efforts in terms of speed, time, and eradication rate.
Checks and Balances & How it Improves Machine Learning Efficiency
Even as the machine learning tool identifies an URL as an illegitimate URL hosting infringed content, anti-piracy analysts manually cross-check the identified websites before authenticating whether the URL has been correctly identified.
This process, in turn, helps further finetune the machine learning systems. These human decisions are used to train the system/machine, which when confronted with similar situations in the future will be better able to deal with the query. A machine learning technique called reinforcement learning in which the machine learns from continuous and relentless trial-and-error is used.
Machine Learning Could Deliver a Decisive Blow on Digital Piracy
Machine-learning technologies that are applied to investigate high-value and high-profile cyber attacks can be used to detect pirate websites, find their owners, and remove illegal content.
Classifying traffic by using IP flow data from an IPFIX/NetFlow feed is an option that seems to have a lot of promise.
Machine learning can exploit weaknesses in the piracy ecosystem where most providers are using a client/server software pair from specific providers, and these can be targeted.
Use IP flow data to detect pirated linear streaming traffic on broadband networks.
Do you think that Machine-Learning Based Piracy Detection system could give digital piracy a final decisive blow, or do you believe that the pirates have a lot more “up their sleeve”?
The internet space via search engines, websites, e-commerce platforms, mobile apps, social media, smartphones, etc., have drastically changed how businesses are conducted and brands perceived. Most purchase decisions and purchases are made after searching & researching the brands, products, and services online.
E‑commerce or market places accounts for over 22% of global retail sales. Most customers come to your website through search engines, email, social media, mobile or online ads, rarely do they come by typing your URL directly into browser address bars.
Since online is where the customers are, the fraudsters with their fake products and services throng to the online space to sell their wares. Brand misuse is done with fully functional fake websites, emails, logos, product descriptions, etc. Everything from music, movies, holiday packages, life-saving drugs, automotive parts are fraudulently sold. Your content and imagery are used to create URLs that appear authentic to hijack your brand, wean your customers, and steal your profits.
As a consequence, brands not only lose their credibility and reputation that they have meticulously built but also lose billions of dollars due to counterfeits and brand abuse. Since many brands are still to grasp the enormity of online frauds, they do not have a comprehensive brand protection strategy for digital channels.
A recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) mentions that fake goods result in over $500 billion in losses annually to legit businesses. The biggest consequence of not protecting the brand online is the loss of trust in the brand. More than 52% of customers have lost trust in a brand after being deceived by counterfeit products.
As search engines are at the epicenter of a buyer’s journey across mobile, web, and social media, it is extremely important that your brand is digitally protected and this is the most important element in your digital marketing strategy.
Needless to say, you should have a comprehensive online brand protection strategy with effective enforcement.
An effective online brand protection strategy should essentially monitor online channels; search engines, social media, marketplaces, e-commerce, and auction sites, paid search, email, etc.
When brand infringement is detected, they should be able to enforce brand rights within the framework of legal guidelines.
Specific enforcement measures might include but not limited to bringing down counterfeit and digital piracy sites, stopping the sale of unlicensed products by delisting counterfeit listings on e‑commerce marketplaces, delisting fraudulent paid search advertisements, eliminating your logo and trademark misuse or misrepresentation, identifying and terminating fake websites, fake social media accounts, taking down typo squatters, cyber squatters, and domain squatters, etc.
Building a competitive advantage with data-derived by brand protection and enforcement. You have to appreciate and understand that the fraudsters are good at identifying demand and supply gaps and capitalizing on that. They are also responsive and adaptive to market changes. By analyzing the data obtained in your fight against digital brand abuse, you can improve marketing, pricing, products, packaging, promotions, customer service, and distribution strategies of your business. They also help you identify price point gaps and opportunities in different market segments. Researching and identifying keywords that counterfeiters are using to wean away traffic from your brand is a great place to begin for your marketing team. They are a clear indication of which keywords are customers using to search for your product.
While customers use search engines for every stage of their buying journey right from the price comparison, feature comparison, product reviews to the actual purchase, brands must deliver credible & trustworthy brand experiences across digital channels.
An effective online brand protection solution helps you recapture revenue, convert potential customers to paying and loyal customers, preserve brand credibility and trust, and safeguard the long-term future of the business.
Selecting the right brand protection partner is the key. Selecting the right brand protection partner could help design an effective brand protection strategy and thus help all key stakeholders make informed decisions and produce measurable results and a compelling ROI.
