Internet pirates may not have peg legs or parrots, but these modern-day thieves are just as troublesome. While the one-eyed sea pirate is hopefully a thing of the past (let's pray there's no real-life Captain Jack Sparrow), today's digital pirates continue their legacy of stealing, causing chaos in the online world.
Did you know:
- In 2023, there were 141 billion visits to online piracy websites, which is a 12% increase from 2019.
- 6 billion illegal online viewings of U.S. produced movies and 126.7 billion viewings of American TV shows annually.
- Pirated video material gets over 230 billion views a year.
- Content from popular sites like Netflix and Prime is also getting leaked.
The statistics are scary, but what's even scarier is that even streaming giants like Netflix has fallen into the trap. So, is there anything that can save your content? In this blog, we'll dive into the different threats piracy poses to your content and the potential solutions that can save the day.
Different ways your content is getting pirated
Screen recording: Pirates often use screen recording software to capture video content directly from their screens. This method is commonly used to record streaming videos from subscription services or pay-per-view events. The process involves running the screen recorder while watching the video, effectively creating a copy of the content.
Ripping: Ripping involves extracting video content from physical media like DVDs and Blu-rays or even from digital streams. This method allows for high-quality duplicates of the original content, which can then be distributed online.
Torrenting:One of the most well-known methods, torrenting, involves downloading and uploading video files through BitTorrent clients like uTorrent. Users download small pieces of the file from multiple sources, which collectively form the complete video. This decentralized approach makes it fast and efficient.
Direct download:Direct download involves obtaining pirated video files from file-sharing websites. Users simply click on a link to download the video file directly to their device. This method is simple and doesn’t require any special software, making it accessible to many. Detection depends on the monitoring practices of the file-sharing services and the popularity of the files being shared.
Hotlinking: Hotlinking involves embedding video files hosted on one website into another, often without permission. Pirates can take advantage of this by finding URLs for hosted video content and embedding or linking to them on their own sites or forums. This allows them to share pirated content without hosting it themselves, thereby avoiding storage costs and legal risks. While the original hosting site incurs bandwidth costs, detecting and stopping hotlinking can be challenging because it requires monitoring and blocking unauthorized access to the hosted files.
Saving your content with DRM
DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is designed to protect digital media, from music and videos to software and beyond. DRM enforces copyright protection and ensures that creators retain control over their intellectual property.
Here’s how a DRM system can help you protect your content.
Controlled access:It can restrict media access to specific IP addresses, locations, or devices, ensuring that only authorized users can view the content.
Time-based restrictions:Users can set expiration dates or limit the number of times media can be accessed, creating a sense of urgency, and controlling distribution.
Sharing limitations: It can either restrict or completely prevent users from sharing or forwarding media, maintaining the integrity of the original distribution channels.
Geographical controls:Users can use DRM to enforce geographical restrictions, making sure that media is accessible only in regions where it is licensed for distribution.
Click hereto get a better understanding about DRM.
Netflixand Prime Video use DRM to protect their content from threats like screen recording, ripping, torrenting, etc. But then how does videos from Netflix leak?
Pirates are always on the lookout for loopholes, and they find one with DRM. On iOS devices, DRM doesn't work on Chrome versions below 124.0.6367.119. To prevent content leaks, Netflix and a few other streaming platforms have limited the quality for non-DRM viewers to 720p. A low-quality, pirated recording that gets even worse during the recording process is much less appealing. This strategy helps keep the content safer.
This restriction on quality is a way to prevent piracy, but is this enough?
Loopholes will always be present if there is one protection wall. DRM is a way to protect it, but what you need more of is multiple walls of protection to truly protect your content.
