Lentis/Antipiracy

Introduction

Antipiracy refers to the movement against the use and distribution of works protected by copyright without the permission of its copyright holder. Widespread access to file sharing on the Internet has made pirating rampant. An estimated 24% of all global bandwidth is used for digital piracy. Therefore, a significant amount of development for online content distribution is put towards preventing piracy. Countering piracy takes a multitude of forms. Some entities go after major distributors of pirated content. Others attempt to make the media is only accessible if the user is proven to be legitimate.

Piracy

Digital piracy is any form of illegal consumption of digital products such as software, entertainment, or other forms of copyrighted material. Piracy is extremely common, with an estimated 37% of all software on personal devices being pirated globally.

Motivations

As the internet grows, piracy too becomes more common. Theft is widely accepted as legally and mostly morally wrong, though piracy becomes a gray area. Many believe that digital piracy is more justifiable than other forms of theft due to a variety of factors, including physicality and direct observable loss. As digital piracy lacks an observable physical effect, people may be more inclined to ignore morality concerns.

People primarily pirate to save money. Piracy is perceived to be cost-saving, time-saving, and convenient. Many consumers would prefer to spend no money rather than purchasing a digital good, especially when those digital products come from larger corporations. Piracy is significantly more common in countries with lower economies. It’s estimated that over 80% of software was consistently duplicated in Indonesia from 2011 to 2017.

The internet grows and changes faster than laws can keep up, so consumers frequently are unaware of the legal repercussions from their actions. A study shows that people are less likely to continue pirating when they are educated on the consequences of their behavior. This study further suggests that copyright owners put forth an effort to educate consumers themselves on the legalities of piracy to decrease the theft of their material.

Methods

Torrents

Torrents are the most infamous approach to pirating media. Torrents leverage peer-to-peer networking for its efficient file sharing capabilities. Any downloader can simultaneously be an uploader, uploading downloaded portions of an ongoing download. This improves download speeds as multiple computers work together to download content. Public torrents have large catalogs of content for anyone to download, including music, movies, books, games, TV shows, and software. Notable public torrents are Pirate Bay, uTorrent, and BitTorrent. The major risk of public torrents is that they are ridden with viruses and malware. Private (invite-only) torrent sites, such as Torrent Day or PassThePopcorn, offer the safest torrenting experience by having far less viruses and malware. They too have the best catalogs, including popular or recently released movies and TV shows. Due to limited users on private torrents, they enforce a "ratio" to ensure rich catalogs. For each user, this number is the ratio between the amount of content uploaded versus the amount of content downloaded. An ideal ratio is 1.0 or higher, indicating the user gives back at least as much bandwidth as they use. If a user's ratio remains below a certain threshold for too long, the site will remove the user's registration.

Sites

Illegal sites are an option for pirated access to movies and TV shows. 123movies, Putlocker, Primewire, FMovies, WatchFree, and Vumoo are examples. Streaming sites like Nbabite, Nflbite, Streameast, Methstreams, and others provide pirated access to live sports. These sites are obvious alternatives to paying for subscriptions like NBA League Pass or Netflix. Like torrents, these sites pose security risks as malware and viruses are often embedded in the many advertisements appear. Ad-blockers are useful tools to use in conjunction with these sites.

Other Tools

Bypassers are browser extensions that bypass paywalls that prevent access to articles. Once downloaded, they can be "loaded as unpacked" in the developer mode of a browser to be used. They are commonly used for viewing news articles without a subscription. Some supported websites include The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Forbes, Discover Magazine, and many more. Media centers like Plex and Jellyfin are services that enable content to be hosted in a netflix-like interface. Some media centers, such as Plex, have robust APIs , enabling users to curate their libraries automatically with scripts. Media centers are not tools intended for piracy, but users may fill their libraries with pirated content for convenient viewing and sharing. Media managers like Sonarr and Radarr track and download shows and movies from torrent sites once available. File sharing tools like SyncThing and File.pizza allow for convenient one-off file transfers between computers.

Dangers

Copyright Owners

Monetary damage is argued to be the most harmful effect of digital piracy, with an estimated loss of billions of dollars a year. In the film industry alone, monetary loss due to digital piracy is estimated to hit $52 billion. It can be discouraging for creators to continue making digital content when they assume it’ll just be pirated, thus halting innovation. Additionally, pirating affects smaller creators more heavily, who rely on the sale of their products to continue their work.

Digital Pirates

As money is at the root of piracy, most sites that host pirated content for “free” will either have ads to generate revenue, or have an ulterior motive with hidden malware in downloaded content. At least half of all pirated content is infected with malware. This is especially dangerous for those who are not technologically skilled and unable to rid their devices of the malware. Even if people are able to rid the viruses from their devices, it still affects the health of their device long-term.

Torrenting specifically introduces a more personal effect for both consumers and distributors, since IP addresses are shared. This can be tracked by law enforcement and lead to legal repercussions or by hackers and open up the device to attacks. Further, internet service providers that notice torrent activity may send warning letters or suspend the service.

Antipiracy Groups

Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment

One group advocating for antipiracy is the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), founded in June 2017 by multiple entertainment and streaming companies, most notably HBO, Netflix, and Twentieth Century Fox . The group claims to support a "global ecosystem of artists, creators, and content proviers" . Additionally, they claim to partner with law enforcement agencies and governments around the world to find illegal streaming websites and shut them down . In August 2021, they shut down a popular illegal streaming website called Flixanity , and in May 2021, they shut down the website 123movies.la, a Tunisian illegal streaming website that received an average of 30 million visits . Similar shutdowns are documented on ACE's website, occurring every few months .

Copyright Alliance

The Copyright Alliance advocates for antipiracy and claims to represent the interests of "authors, photographers, performers, artists, software developers, musicians, journalists, directors, songwriters, game designers, and many other individual creators" , as well as support policies that promote copyright protection. Their recent news releases frequently issue statements on antipiracy laws passed by Congress and support court cases where copyright law was upheld , including participating in hearings such as the DMCA hearing in December 2020 .

Governments

The federal government of the United States has piracy laws structured in such a way that the focus is much more on the copyright holder’s rights rather than the acts of digital piracy itself. In Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution, the founders laid out the power for the federal government “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. Although this does protect the rights of intellectual property holders, it does not explicitly speak on what the government will do to protect those rights.  The Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies (SMART) Copyright Act of 2022 is a bill which as of December 2022 is in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Proposed by Senator Thomas Tillis, it states, “A covered service provider shall use commercially reasonable efforts to accommodate and not interfere with designated technical measures that apply to that covered service provider”.

The European Union enacted the Digital Services Act in November of 2022, which functions as a list of new standards for how the European Commission believes the internet should function. In terms of illegal goods and services, which would include pirated content, it “imposes new mechanisms allowing users to flag illegal content online, and for platforms to cooperate with specialised ‘trusted flaggers’ to identify and remove illegal content”. It also imposes new rules regarding the tracing of sellers and their goods in order to find distributors of illegal goods more easily.

Nintendo

The video game company Nintendo has a long history fighting with digital pirates over their content. They now have antipiracy programs in 40 countries dedicated to securing their intellectual property. The organization works with governments and “aggressively pursues legal actions worldwide against those involved in Nintendo piracy”. These programs also work toward consumer awareness by conducting campaigns to notify the consumer about the illegal practices of piracy. Another facet of these programs is to lobby governments in their respective regions for stronger policy against digital piracy. One section states that they also work towards educating law enforcement in order to better protect their copyright. Although much of the information is reliable and true, some of the claims made in their frequently asked questions section have controversial legal standing. In one such case Nintendo claims that there is misinformation being spread online over the legality of making copies of games one already owns.

Groups Against Antipiracy

Defective by Design

Defective by Design is an initiative formed on May 24, 2006 by the Free Software Foundation that oppose the use Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in the sale and distribution of digital media. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a blanket term for technologies designed to enforce copyright protection on digital media and software. These technologies make it so that a given piece of software can't run properly without authentication from the copyright holder. Common forms of DRM include proprietary file formats, product keys and online authentication. The philosophy behind the opposition is that DRM, by nature, "creates a damaged good" and "prevents [the user] from doing what would be possible without it" In effect, DRM only serves give companies the power to control the media that their customers consume.

Low Income Demographics

Industry standard software, such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office, is often expensive. This creates a monetary barrier to entry for those entering these industries. Piracy grants a way around this barrier. Some software developers recognize this and adapted their model accordingly. Unity, a popular game engine, offers a Personal Plan that allows free use of the software as long as the revenue received from the game remains below a certain threshold. Shortly after adoption, the Unreal Engine, a major competitor, began to mimic that model.

Good Old Games (GOG)

GOG.com is a video game and film distribution platform that bans the use of DRM in what they sell. Based out of Poland, it was founded in a place where video game piracy was rampant. In order to combat this, they found ways to incentivize users to buy the game instead of pirating. Methods in the past included localizing the game for foreign audiences and updating the game for newer hardware.

Large Threats to Piracy and Countermeasures

Password Sharing

Data surveys show that upwards of 49% of people have admitted to password sharing in order to access paid content with percentages higher in younger demographics. In hopes to lower these large numbers, streaming services have started campaigns to remind users that password sharing is morally wrong and illegal. Additionally, measures such as two-factor authentication are now being implemented in testing phases by companies such as Netflix as a deterrent to make password sharing an extra step more cumbersome . The downside is that adding this extra step makes the service less satisfying for non-pirating users.

Watermarking

Watermarking is a technique used to discourage the use of proprietary property by allowing functionality without the ability to remove a quality final product. Watermarking is a new take on access control allowing potential consumers to become acquainted with a product before having to make a financial purchase. This technique is used heavily by software products and online media vendor sites.

The technique also serves as piracy detection known as Coded Anti-piracy. Modern technology can encode data into film or streaming content giving information on where the media is being presented without being obviously visible to the viewer or pirate consuming the content. This information could be the ID or location of a movie theatre showing a film or operating system of a device playing stolen content . The pirated content which can be easily analyzed by the producer who has the decoding filter to view the embedded watermarked data and form conclusions about where the content is being stolen from.

Pay-what's-fair Model

The pay-what's-fair model is a method which independent creators, including the rock band Radiohead, have used to limit piracy of their content. Instead of charging a fixed price to access the content, the creator will implement the model, which allows each consumer to pay however much they think the content is worth. In the case of Radiohead, the English rock band's album In Rainbows was released using the pay-what's-fair model in 2007 . Radiohead made $3 million off of this model, with the average user paying $6 to buy the album. Additionally, their lead vocalist Thom Yorke claimed that Radiohead "made more money out of this record [In Rainbows] than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together”, which demonstrates the success that this model can have .

Limitations

Analog Hole

The Analog Hole is a concept often used to posit that digital piracy is an inevitability. It describes the idea that no matter how you protect something from piracy, there will always be a "hole" in the form of analog recording. In other words, as long as a human can consume a piece of media, there will always exist a simple way to reproduce it. An example of this concept would be bootleg recordings of films and TV shows. As long as people can watch movies or TV shows, there can be little stopping someone from recording it and uploading it elsewhere.

Negative Performance Impact

DRM comes with additional processing on top of the software it is protecting. Sometimes, this can make the software perform significantly worse. Denuvo is a DRM software that is popular among AAA video game studios. The software itself is often criticized for being cumbersome and unreliable. In some cases, it made it impossible for certain users to access the games they own.

Reliability and Abuse

For large-scale content distribution platforms, such as YouTube, copyright protection systems are largely automated. It is not uncommon for these system to be abused or falsely flag legitimate users as pirates. UMG has garnered a reputation for abuse on multiple platforms for making false claims of copyright infringement. YouTube's systems has been criticized for its automatic system for identifying pirated content. Due to the nature of these systems, a creator's content can be taken down or completely demonetized with little ability for them to appeal these false claims.

Motives and Choice Architecture

The primary motive for pirating content is dominated by money. People do not want to pay for highly-priced subscription streaming services that often are not affordable in order to watch one specific source of media. However, it is important to note that in many cases a large number of these pirates are actual willing to pay for either legal or pirated content . These users are simply motivated by finding access to large selections of reasonably priced quality content.

Honor alone does not appear to be a strong enough factor to prevent pirate activity. Research indicates that up to 75% of pirates will admit that what they are doing is wrong . Consumers of pirated material are continuing to receive access to desired media for cheaper prices and are not facing consequences. Current crackdown on illegal pirate activity is mainly focusing on stopping the providers distributing the pirated material rather than the consumers. A bill titled the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act included as part of the Covid-19 Stimulus act now has illegal streamers facing heavy fines and jail time upwards of 10 years to create a larger deterrent. One programmer, Darryl Julius Polo, was sentenced to 57 months of jail and forced to give up $1 million for helping and starting streaming services Jetflicks and iStreamitAll which reportedly held databases individually larger than Netflix and Hulu .

Conclusion

The success of the antipiracy movement will be mostly dependent on the quality of the choice architecture presented to consumers by companies and the artists they represent. Consumers will use the content that provides the most value to them with quality and price holding high priority and placing lesser regard on whether their action is legal or honorable. Users are currently not being held accountable for their actions and are not facing legal repercussions. Information is very widespread and hard to lock down and legal processes take time and money so piracy is a hard problem to stop. Technological methods can be used to make pirating harder and are worth improving, but companies should shed more focus on balancing the benefits of boosting profits while providing consumers reasonable opportunity and motive to not pirate content. Additional research into the antipiracy movement could further explore the psychology behind piracy or more details on economic harm.