Piracy is by no means exclusive to any particular generation but among the general public, it’s often associated with younger people.

This notion may very well change over time as the Internet-native generation gets older. That said, younger people tend to be more open to change, also when it comes to piracy habits.

Over the past two decades, new online piracy sites, apps and other consumption methods have emerged. This can pose quite a challenge for anti-piracy outfits, whose main goal is to spot new piracy trends and nip them in the bud.

Social Media Piracy Panel

To help with this ongoing process, Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance plans to involve youth directly. This week, a job listing appeared online offering teens an hourly wage of 150 Danish kroner (~US$22) to join a piracy discussion panel.

“We want to know more about young people’s ways of being and behaving on social media – and online in general. With your help, we will become much wiser about young people’s behavior and will be able to reach new heights in our work.”

Rights Alliance is specifically looking for young people between the ages of 15 and 17. These teens will join a panel of eight peers who, together with an employee from the anti-piracy group, will discuss piracy-related Internet and social media developments.

Friends and Family are Safe

There’s no need for prospective candidates to be deeply involved in illegal activities or to expose pirating friends. The main goal is to learn how young people are exposed to pirated media during their online activities, which can help to spot emerging threats.

“It is important for us to emphasize that you should not disclose yourself, your friends or others in your social circle. The sole purpose is to help us learn more about current trends,” Rights Alliance clarifies.

According to the job listing , each panel meeting will last for roughly two hours with three tentatively scheduled for the coming year. The meetings will take place in Copenhagen and travel expenses will be covered.

While it’s unusual for anti-piracy organizations to recruit teenagers, it makes a lot of sense. Piracy preferences change rapidly and obtaining direct input from younger people is a relatively effective way to keep an eye on new developments.

Preventing Bad Habits

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund says that the panel should help to provide more insight into the habits and behavior of today’s youth on social media.

“We are especially looking into how we can educate and perhaps prevent young people from forming bad habits with regard to consuming illegal content like live football, films, etcetera, on social media platforms,” Fredenslund notes.

Online piracy remains a major challenge in Denmark. Last year, an annual survey carried out by Mediavision revealed that movie and TV piracy had reached the highest level in nine years . According to the same research, YouTube and Facebook were cited as the most used piracy sources, but it’s likely they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In recent years, website blocking has become one of the most widely-used anti-piracy enforcement mechanisms in the world.

ISPs in several dozen countries prevent subscribers from accessing a variety of ‘pirate’ sites. While new blocks are added every month, research on the effectiveness of these efforts is rather limited.

Early Piracy Blocking Research

One of the earliest pieces of academic research, based on UK data, showed that the local Pirate Bay blockade had little effect on legal consumption . Instead, pirates turned to alternative pirate sites, proxies, or VPNs to bypass the virtual restrictions.

A follow-up study added more color and brought hope for rightsholders. The research showed that once a large number of sites were blocked in the UK, overall pirate site traffic decreased . At the same time, the researchers observed an increase in traffic to legal services such as Netflix.

These academic studies originated at Carnegie Mellon University. They were conducted independently but the research received sizable gifts from the Motion Picture Association. The movie industry group often cites these results to show that site blocking is effective.

New Blocking Study Adds Nuance

The two blocking papers and their results are founded on quality research, but they’re not without limitations. One shortcoming is that they are based on UK data that may differ from how blocking measures affect piracy and legal consumption in other parts of the world.

A recently released study can partly fill this gap. It was conducted by researchers from the Catolica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics in Portugal, in collaboration with a colleague who, again, is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University.

Instead of looking at UK data, the researchers analyzed data from a country where a voluntary pirate site blocking scheme was introduced at some point.

The target country isn’t mentioned but considering that the researchers are Portuguese, paired with the fact that Portugal is one of the few countries which has a voluntary blocking scheme , we can take an informed guess.

Tracking Internet, TV, and Spending Habits

Similar to the UK research, the new study uses a natural experiment, namely, the introduction of ISP blocking efforts. The researchers relied on survey data and received help from a telco provider who provided anonymous data on a random sample of 100k subscribers.

These data can differentiate BitTorrent users from the general sample and includes other metrics such as upload and download traffic, paid VoD expenses, aggregate TV viewership time, as well as daily BitTorrent use.

This treasure trove of data resulted in an article of which a preprint copy was published recently. The writeup has yet to be peer-reviewed but the results are interesting enough to warrant an early inspection.

Less Traffic

One of the main and most unique findings is that blocking measures have a clear effect on the Internet traffic generated by BitTorrent users. Both upload and download usage decreased significantly for (former) BitTorrent users, without a noticeable rebound over time.

This finding is backed up by an overall drop in the percentage of households that used BitTorrent, which clearly declined and continued to do so in the months after the blockades were implemented. All in all, this suggests that piracy has decreased as well.

“Our results show that blocking access to copyright infringing websites reduces Internet traffic, which proxies piracy activity,” the researchers write.

Interestingly, the drop in upload and download traffic is asymmetric, with a relatively larger decrease in upload traffic. The researchers suggest that this could potentially mean that some BitTorrent users switched to streaming piracy, which doesn’t require uploading, or to legal streaming services that were not measured.

VPN Searches Spiked

The data sample also covered search activity, which was sourced from Google trends. The researchers specifically examined the terms “proxy”, “VPN”, and “DNS” which all spiked when the blocking measures were implemented.

We have seen similar patterns in other countries where site-blocking measures first appeared. This would suggest that people were trying to find ways to circumvent the blockades.

After a few months, search activity returns to normal levels, but by then, most persistent pirates will have figured out how to access the blocked sites.

“These figures suggest that although website blocking seems to have been effective in leading some households away from piracy, some users learnt how to circumvent the DNS blocks and likely continued downloading content from the blocked websites,” the researchers note.

No Boost in Legal Alternatives

Ideally, pirate site blocks should positively impact legal consumption. For example, people could use VoD services more, show interest in paid TV channels, and increase regular TV viewing.

However, when comparing the legal use of BitTorrent users before and after the widespread blocking measures, the researchers found little effect.

“We found no statistically significant changes in the consumption of the paid legal alternatives considered, only a very modest increase in TV viewership. These results suggest that the website blocks were effective in curbing digital piracy but did not benefit offline legal alternatives.”

The referenced modest effect translates to a 2.5-minute increase in total TV time for these pirates and a 1.8-minute boost in viewership for channels dedicated to movies and TV shows.

Limitations

These results show that site blocking impacts Internet traffic and presumably piracy too. However, a boost in legal activity is not guaranteed. There are some important caveats to this overall conclusion, however.

One drawback is that legal movie and TV streaming alternatives in the researched country were rather underdeveloped at the time. The availability and use of services such as Netflix was limited, for example.

This means that the results may have been different in a country with more legal options. And in general, the researchers note that results in one region, can’t always be generalized to other countries.

In addition, the findings are limited to mostly BitTorrent piracy. They don’t show how usage of other pirate options, such as streaming sites and IPTV may have changed.

All in all, however, we can say that the study adds some very welcome extra insight into the effectiveness of pirate site blockades.

—

A copy of the preprint publication titled ‘Controlling Digital Piracy Via Domain Name System Blocks: A Natural Experiment’, is available on SSRN .

_{Reis, Filipa and Godinho de Matos, Miguel and Ferreira, Pedro, Controlling Digital Piracy Via Domain Name System Blocks: A Natural Experiment. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4335662}

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The Oscars are the most anticipated movie awards show of the year, closely followed by hundreds of millions of movie fans around the world.

Next month, the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony is scheduled to take place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, where millions of movie fans will see the crowning of this year’s “Best Picture”.

There are currently ten contenders in the race for the prestigious award. The nominees range from blockbuster titles such as “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Top Gun: Maverick, to lesser-known gems such as “Tár” and “Triangle of Sadness”.

Oscar Pirates

An Oscar nomination is a big deal for the latter category. The press attention opens the door to a new audience, which ultimately translates into additional revenue. However, there’s also a darker side to this phenomenon in the form of online piracy.

Pirates come in all shapes and sizes but their consumption habits show a lot of overlap with the rest of the population. This means that if a movie is generating positive headlines, more people will be interested in downloading or streaming a pirated copy.

To demonstrate this phenomenon, we looked at the estimated number of downloads through torrent sites for all best picture nominees, excluding “Women Talking,” which hadn’t been pirated yet.

The Nomination Boost

These data, collected with help from Iknow , reveal a clear Oscar boost for the nominated titles. On the first full day after the announcement, the downloads for nearly all films increased compared to a week earlier. This Oscar-boost effect ranges from 10% to 90%, as shown in the overview below.

Movie	Increase (18/25 January)
All Quiet on the Western Front	61%
Avatar: The Way of Water	-9%
Elvis	43%
Everything Everywhere All at Once	60%
Tár	89%
The Banshees of Inisherin	63%
The Fabelmans	58%
Top Gun: Maverick	15%
Triangle of Sadness	68%

There are two main outliers in this list; “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Top Gun: Maverick”. These are the biggest blockbusters, already seen by millions, and the extra exposure didn’t do all that much.

The effect is markedly different for “Tár” and “Triangle of Sadness”, with interest almost doubling for both following the Oscar nominations. The other titles ended up somewhere in the middle, still with significant increases.

The chart above shows daily download estimates for the Oscar nominees, excluding the two blockbusters. This clearly shows the spike starting on the 24th of January, which lasted for a few days. After that, pirate interest in these titles went back to normal.

More Awards?

When we first looked at the data we couldn’t immediately explain why there was a separate increase in downloads on January 11th for “The Fablemans”, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, and “The Banshees of Inisherin”. That was two weeks before the nominations. Could there be something wrong with the data?

While we can never completely rule out errors, the more likely explanation is another awards show. On January 11th “The Fablemans”, “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won multiple Golden Globes , beating all other films.

These data show that awards shows are still a big deal, also for pirates. However, the effect is the most pronounced for smaller releases that gain most from additional media exposure. If one of these scoops up the best picture award next month, another major piracy boost is likely.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Commissioned by the Australian Attorney-General’s Department, the annual Consumer Survey on Online Copyright Infringement is now available for 2022.

The Australian Government has commissioned these surveys since 2015, with the goal of understanding internet users’ consumption habits related to several core content types: music, video games, movies, TV shows and live sports, with the latter appearing more recently in 2019.

The 2022 Consumer Copyright Infringement Survey was conducted online from 24 June to 14 July 2022 and sought responses from internet users aged 12+ regarding their consumption habits in the preceding three months. Overall, 72% of respondents said they consumed content from at least one of the categories.

Overall Consumption and Legality

Consumption of content online increased in 2022 over the figures reported the previous year. TV shows were consumed by 57% of respondents in 2021, with 60% reporting doing so in 2022. An identical three-point increase was observed in the consumption of movies (53% in 2021 / 57% in 2022) and music (45% in 2021 / 48% in 2022).

Video game consumption leaped from 26% in 2021 to 37% in 2022, with live sports reaching 34% in 2022, up from 26% recorded the previous year.

Rather than expecting respondents to determine the legality of their consumption methods, methods were classified as either ‘likely to be lawful’ or ‘likely to be unlawful’ in advance. This allowed respondents to point out the methods used, without discussing legality in depth.

Roughly three-quarters of the population consuming content exclusively from legal sources is a decent result, but closer inspection reveals a caveat. This figure relates to respondents who consumed content in all categories – music, video games, movies, TV shows, and live sports.

Similarly, the remaining 22% to 26% detailed below are respondents who consumed content from all categories, with “at least some” of that content consumed from sources that had a predetermined status of “likely to be unlawful.”

At its most basic level, the term ‘infringer’ in the report identifies a respondent who “reported consuming any content in a way that was likely to be unlawful.” Couple that with respondents who consume content from fewer categories, and Australia suddenly has a problem to solve.

Significant Infringement Increase

The study identifies a ‘non-infringer’ as a respondent who exclusively consumed content from sources predetermined as ‘likely to be lawful’. A single instance of infringement renders a non-infringer an infringer, but in this case, no amount of consumption from legal sources can redeem an infringer.

As result, when the survey balances those who streamed or downloaded any content in the previous three months across any of the content types (music, movies, TV shows, video games, and/or live sports), the picture becomes more gloomy.

This 39% ‘overall infringement’ rate is up from the 30% reported in 2021 and exceeds the 34% reported in 2020. However, a new type of behavior introduced for the first time contributed to the rise in 2022. Pre-categorized as “likely” to be unlawful, credential sharing pushed up infringer rates by four points.

Credential Sharing

New unlawful methods of consumption are a feature of a continuously developing piracy landscape. In an effort to keep up with these emerging trends, the 2022 survey considered respondents who “pay a small fee to access one or many subscription services through a shared / unknown account (e.g. shared login credentials).”

Most people understand the concept of password sharing; a friend or family member shares their Netflix password, for example, so that the other person doesn’t have to pay. It’s the most common type of credential sharing for that very reason – it’s free.

By including “pay a small fee”, the category might be targeting people who share accounts with others for a fee, but then that misses the overwhelming majority who don’t. That leaves hacked/stolen accounts or conceivably subscription IPTV services, but as a paid piracy option, IPTV doesn’t appear in a distinct category of its own.

Despite the potential for confusion, 11% of all respondents said they had paid a small fee to access one or many subscription services through a shared or unknown account.

Muddying the waters a little more is the finding that of all respondents who personally pay for a legal subscription service, 33% allow someone outside their household to use it.

Site Blocking Measures

Site blocking doesn’t appear to bother pirates too much in Australia, possibly because the general public has seen it all before. After being denied timely access to legal movies and TV shows for many years, Australians turned to VPNs to ‘unblock’ access to overseas content.

According to this year’s study, 17% of consumers encountered a blocked site in the previous three months. Six out of ten “simply gave up” trying to access any content at all, a figure directly in line with last year’s survey.

Of the remainder, 16% bypassed the block, 14% sought alternative lawful access, while 6% attempted to obtain the same content for free from other illegal sources.

Pirate Blocking Countermeasures

Those who bypassed website blocks used various tools. With 46% overall, VPNs came out on top but still fell short of the 61% who used them in 2021. Just 6% used a custom DNS but nearly a quarter of respondents (23%) said they were aware of them.

Almost a quarter (24%) used some kind of proxy website, versus 21% in 2021. Nearly one-fifth (18%) say they used a search engine to find an alternative site, while 15% used Google Translate as a workaround.

The full report offers plenty of ammunition for those on all sides of the piracy debate.

For the optimistic, roughly three-quarters of the most dedicated consumers of content in all categories never pirate anything. Of the remainder, the majority are buying something, meaning they can be encouraged to buy more.

Even the estimates relating to fewer content categories aren’t that bad. When 61% of consumers exclusively use legal content and 39% are reported as having obtained pirated content once or more, that doesn’t mean 39% pirate everything.

“Within content types, no more than 12% of all respondents use only unlawful methods to access content and just 3% of all respondents use only unlawful consumption methods across all content types they consume,” the report reveals.

Or as the Australian government frames it: “Research conducted for the Attorney-General’s Department has revealed the rate of Australians accessing online content unlawfully remains disturbingly high.”

Consumer Survey on Online Copyright Infringement 2022 can be found here

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The UK Government’s Intellectual Property Office has published a new edition of its Online Copyright Infringement Tracker study.

The annual survey aims to understand the piracy habits of citizens aged 12 and above. This is the 12th wave of the report and relates to consumption during 2022. The overarching trend is one of overall piracy rates remaining mostly static for the past six years but the details paint a more interesting bigger picture.

Overall Infringement Rate Up

In common with previous years, the latest study details consumption habits for a wide range of content, including movies, TV shows, music, live sports, video games, software, and ebooks.

Overall infringement rates (respondents who accessed any content illegally) increased from 25% to 32% in 2022. However, the government says the figure should be interpreted with caution due to new methods of access being included each year. Nevertheless, overall infringement does appear to be increasing.

Movie piracy hit an overall infringement rate of 23%, up 4% from its previous high recorded in wave 11 (2021). TV show piracy increased 1% over the previous high recorded back in 2019, but once again the government urges caution.

“The increase in most categories was driven by a greater proportion of individuals using a mix of legal and illegal methods, rather than the purely (i.e. only) illegal group. For most categories the purely illegal group has remained stable and low,” the Intellectual Property Office explains.

When it comes to music streaming, ‘low’ is an overstatement. An incredible 97% of music consumers in the UK relied entirely on legal sources last year, with a negligible 2% using legal and illegal sources and 0% relying exclusively on illegal sources.

Give or take, that’s been the position for the last four years. Spoiling the party a little are the 9.2 million people estimated to have downloaded at least one track illegally in 2022.

Figures for movie streaming reveal that 83% used only legal sources, 15% relied on a mix, and just 3% pirated everything they watched. Overall, these rates represent a couple of percentage points change in favor of piracy over the figures reported last year.

For TV show streaming, the rates are 86%, 12%, and 2% respectively, with legal-only down three points, mixed legal/illegal up three, and illegal-only consumption static. The picture in 2022 is broadly in line with data published in 2019.

Overall Rates of Infringement

Overall infringement rates in the report should be viewed in context. Digital magazines, for example, have an infringement rate of 41%, meaning that four out of ten people who consume that type of content did so from an illegal source at least once in the previous three months.

With an infringement rate of 38% overall, software piracy is much higher than music (25%), movies (24%), and TV shows (19%), but far more people consume content from the latter three categories. In the case of TV shows, a 19% infringement rate equates to 9% of the entire sample, a total of 6.2 million infringers overall.

The figures for those who consume music, movies, and TV shows completely legally, mixed, or entirely illegally, have now returned to pre-COVID levels. The same is true for live sports streamers, albeit with a key difference.

While the music and movie industries still oppose piracy, overt anti-piracy messaging from these sectors has been relatively low-key for the past few years. In the live sports sector, campaigns led by the Federation Against Copyright Theft and UK police, on behalf of the Premier League, Sky, and BT Sports, have been relentless.

According to government figures, continuous anti-piracy campaigning by the live sports sector has produced figures that are no better than those achieved by the movie and music sectors with minimal messaging.

The report suggests that attitudes towards anti-piracy campaigns have changed. Where “authoritative” tones and threats of disconnection were previously seen as effective, many participants now call for an ‘understanding’ tone and for campaigns from the industry to “feel cooperative and working with, not punishing, the consumer.”

Illegal Streaming of Live Sports

In 2020, overall infringement rates among consumers of live sports sat at 37%. In 2021, the overall rate dropped to 29%, with 71% using only legal sources, 18% using a mix, and exclusively illegal content consumers at 12%.

In the most recent wave covering 2022, overall infringement of live sports reached 36%, roughly on par with 2020 levels. In 2022, that equates to 3.9 million people streaming at least some sports content illegally.

The way people consumed live sports streams is also going in the wrong direction. Those consuming content entirely from legal sources dropped from 71% in 2021 to 64% in 2022. Consumers of a legal/illegal mix increased by three points to 21%. Consumers of strictly illegal content increased to 15% versus the 12% reported a year earlier.

Whether these figures will deteriorate further during 2022 remains to be seen, but price rises recently announced by UK subscription broadcasters seem unlikely to help. That’s also the case in respect of other persistent problems in the video sector.

The UK Loves Entertainment But Can’t Always Afford It

Unsurprisingly, the study found that entertainment is valued by the UK, particularly so during the extraordinary circumstances of recent years.

“Previous waves during the pandemic had shown how entertainment could serve almost as a companion during times of lockdown where some felt isolated. Now, entertainment was said to help many by distracting them from uncertainty around money and anxiety around going back into a world without social restrictions for some,” the report reads.

“However, the rise in the cost of living experienced across the UK meant that while participants wanted to keep consuming all their entertainment at the same rate they had been, some were thinking about canceling some of their subscriptions to save money.”

Cutting Back: Value for Money or Nothing

Despite people feeling the pinch in the UK and beyond, streaming music services seem to have hit the sweet spot on price, quality, and service. For roughly £2.50 per week, almost all music is available in unlimited quantities and for everything else, YouTube will suffice.

With piracy rates close to zero, the music industry has shown that it’s possible to compete with free and make a profit at the same time. Movies, TV shows and live sports have other problems to solve but in the meantime, these are the key content areas most likely to face issues.

“[W]here content was split across multiple platforms,” the report notes, “some felt they could not justify paying for more than one or two.”

UK football fans are well aware that subscribing to three platforms doesn’t get them everything they want to watch, so that doesn’t sound particularly encouraging. Losing fans to other activities sounds like an even worse proposition.

Other than canceling Sky subscriptions, alternatives cited by respondents include gardening, watching more content on Netflix and BBC iPlayer, and playing video games. At least one respondent spoke about re-reading old books and the possibility of getting rid of them altogether.

“Recovering from the Covid pandemic and all the price rises has been really hard. I definitely don’t buy as many books and am looking for free reads more often. I’ve just got all my novels out of storage to read to save a bit of money and might have to start selling them off,” one participant said.

VPN Use in the UK

With privacy concerns on the increase and site-blocking rampant in the UK, internet users of all kinds are turning to VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). The study found that across all categories, respondents who used a VPN specifically for obtaining entertainment content were more likely to have infringed compared to those who used a VPN for activity other than entertainment content consumption.

“For most categories, differences between those who used a VPN for entertainment content and those who did not were large (10%+) for most categories, levels of infringement were similar for those who used a VPN but not for entertainment content and those who did not use a VPN at all,” the report notes.

The 12th wave of the UK’s Online Copyright Infringement Tracker can be found here

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

By offering free access to millions of ‘paywalled’ research papers, Sci-Hub is often described as “The Pirate Bay of Science”.

The site is used by researchers from all over the world, to acquire papers they otherwise have a hard time accessing. For some, Sci-Hub is essential for their work.

Major academic publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society, view this rogue research library as a direct threat to their business model. This has resulted in several lawsuits, including two that were won by publishers through default judgments in U.S. courts .

Despite these court rulings and various site-blocking orders in other countries, Sci-Hub and founder Alexandra Elbakyan refuse to back down. On the contrary, the site has become a household name in many academic institutions, where open access to research carries more value than copyright protection.

Pirate Sites First?

A recent research paper confirms this preference while providing further insight into the prevalence of Sci-Hub use. The goal of the study is to find out if academics are willing to use pirate sites to bypass paywalled content and what their main motivations are.

The study ( paywall ), published in the peer-reviewed journal Information Development, shares the results of an international survey among more than 3,300 researchers. These academics come from a variety of disciplines, including STEM, social, and life sciences.

One of the main findings is that piracy is not the default option when people are confronted by a paywall. Finding an open-access version is the most common option, followed by asking colleagues from other institutions for a copy.

The use of shadow libraries, with Sci-Hub as the prime example, is the third most popular bypass. This makes it more popular than interinstitutional loans or paying for articles with one’s own money.

Majority Use Pirate Sites

While pirate sites may not be the first option for researchers trying to circumvent paywalls, it is fairly common. The researchers report that more than half of all respondents (57%) use or have used pirate sites to access research.

The main reason to go to Sci-Hub and other pirate portals is to bypass restrictions. However, the main motivation for nearly 18% of the self-proclaimed ‘pirates’ is that shadow libraries are easier to use due to the authentication systems deployed by legal alternatives.

Perhaps even more worrying for publishers is that 12% cite publishers profiting from academics as the main reason.

Growing Problem?

Looking at the demographics more closely, the researchers found that younger academics are more likely to use shadow libraries. The same applies to researchers at less wealthy institutions. This suggests that the problem isn’t going away anytime soon.

“[W]e found that younger researchers are keener to use piracy services. This might imply that younger scholars are incorporating pirate libraries as a natural element of their environment and information retrieval tools. However, their older colleagues are more reluctant to use such services.

“This finding might seriously impact the attitudes and landscape of scholarly information in the future,” the researchers add.

Of course, there are also plenty of researchers who never use pirate sites. Their main motivation is that shadow libraries are seen as unethical (46%) but a large percentage of scholars are simply unaware that these sites exist (36%).

All in all, the findings confirm that Sci-Hub and similar sites remain relatively popular. The research shows that legal options to bypass paywalls are preferred, but if those are not available, most researchers can find their way to pirate libraries.

—

Segado-Boj, F., Martín-Quevedo, J., & Prieto-Gutiérrez, J. (2022). Jumping over the paywall: Strategies and motivations for scholarly piracy and other alternatives. Information Development. https://doi.org/10.1177/02666669221144429

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In recent years, many people have canceled their expensive cable subscriptions, opting to use cheaper Internet TV instead.

While there are plenty of legal streaming options available, there’s also a broad offer of IPTV services that are specifically set up to deliver content but without permission from rightsholders.

€1 Billion Pirate IPTV Revenue

These high-quality pirate IPTV services are often sold through monthly or yearly subscriptions. Over the years, this business model has transformed into an industry generating serious revenue. According to a new report, income surpassed €1 billion in Europe last year.

The research, commissioned Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA), was carried out by the Centre for Intellectual Property, Policy & Management at Bournemouth University. It draws on data from rightsholders as well as the European Audiovisual Observatory, which produced a comparable study three years ago.

The new findings show a slight increase in IPTV service revenue compared to the previous study, from €941.7 million to €1.06 billion. The average spend on illegal IPTV subscriptions is now slightly more than 5 euros per month.

Interestingly, the number of Europeans (27 EU countries + UK) who use pirate IPTV services shows even more growth – 13.7m to 17.1m – an increase of around 25% in three years.

The fact that revenue grew slower can be explained by lower monthly subscription costs. Contrary to the prevailing inflation trend, pirate IPTV subscriptions have actually become cheaper.

Youth in the Lead

There are large differences in illegal IPTV service use between age cohorts. Most subscribers are younger, and among 16 to 24-year-olds, 11.8% have access to these unauthorized services.

The researchers note that piracy is a bigger draw for the youth as they generally have less money to spend. Younger generations are also more used to streaming content and generally have a more accepting attitude toward piracy.

“[D]ifferences are explained by not only a perception toward IP and piracy but also by other factors such as average income, internet use, and TV viewing habits that differ significantly between age groups.”

“Overall, young Europeans have a more tolerant attitude towards pirated online content,” the researchers add, referring to EU’s latest Intellectual Property and Youth Scoreboard published earlier in the year.

Geographical Differences

The scale of the IPTV problem varies from country to country. The Netherlands and Luxembourg have the highest percentage of pirate IPTV users, with 8.2% and 7.9% respectively. In Romania and Poland, it’s far less common with 0.8% and 1.5%.

In absolute numbers, the UK poses the biggest problem, with well over 3 million pirate IPTV users.

Germany and France are not far behind with 2.5 and 2.4 million users respectively. And while Luxembourg has one of the highest percentages of IPTV pirates, this translates to ‘only’ 37,561 users.

€3.2 Billion Lost Revenue

The report adds a new element by estimating the potential revenue that legal IPTV providers are losing due to widespread piracy. The estimate is based on legal subscription prices and the share of users who would be willing to pay for IPTV subscriptions.

This ‘willing to pay’ estimate is based on data supplied by AAPA members. This presumably assumes a fictitious scenario where pirate IPTV alternatives are not available. Based on these numbers the report estimates that legal pay-TV providers incurred a loss of €3.2 billion last year.

Commenting on the findings, AAPA’s Executive Vice President Sheila Cassells notes this loss also affects consumers because fewer profits lead to less investment into innovation and new content.

This talking point will also be communicated to lawmakers, as AAPA will use the report to lobby for more effective anti-piracy measures in Europe and elsewhere.

“In the face of current challenges, the efforts of AAPA are ever more required to promote efficient and effective legislation and intellectual property rights enforcement. This research acts as an information tool to raise awareness among European citizens, policymakers, law enforcement and the industry,” Cassells notes.

—

A copy of the AAPA full report titled “Illicit IPTV in Europe” can be found here

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

There is little doubt that video and music streaming services have taken the Internet by storm over the past decade.

An entire “on-demand” generation is growing up, and the streaming business model is generating billions of dollars in revenue.

Competing With Piracy

This change was spurred on by piracy. When Spotify and Netflix started their streaming services, they openly positioned themselves as piracy competitors. And indeed, in the early years, many casual pirates were drawn to these platforms.

More recently, this early selling point has started to degrade, especially when it comes to video streaming services, of which there are many. Instead of offering an attractively broad selection of content to subscribers, exclusive releases are now the preferred tools to draw customers in.

The video streaming wars have reached a point where many people can no longer afford to pay for everything they want to see. Ironically, this drives them back to pirate sites where they occasionally watch content for free.

More U.S. Households Believe Piracy is Justified

New survey results released by Parks Associates suggest that the attitudes of U.S. consumers towards piracy have started to shift as well. The data are released as a promotion for the Future of Video conference . While there’s not much detail on the methodology, the results are quite clear.

Nearly a quarter (23%) of all U.S. households agree that piracy is acceptable because movies and music should be available to everyone for free. This is a considerable increase on the position three years ago, when only 14% strongly agreed with this statement.

Similar increases are observed for other piracy justifications, including the argument that movie and music companies make a lot of money, and the belief that no one ever gets into trouble for pirating content.

Support for password sharing also appears to have increased, as roughly one in five households are okay with unlicensed media usage, as long as someone else is paying for the service.

The survey isn’t exactly an academic study and from the data presented it’s not clear how many households are actively pirating content, versus simply using someone else’s password to access a legal service. However, the strong results suggest that people’s attitudes are changing.

Experts See Room for Improvement

The results of the survey will be discussed at the Future of Video conference, where many participants will emphasize the need or advertise options for stricter enforcement. This includes streaming video provider and protection service Synamedia.

“Piracy’s impact has gone from bad to worse, and it’s hitting content owners and service providers where it hurts: in their pockets. The good news is there is technology and intelligence available to keep content secure and stop them in their tracks,” Steve Epstein from Synamedia says.

At the same time, there are also companies that recognize the fragmentation problem. This includes video streaming aggregator Reelgood, which tries to bring order to the streaming chaos.

“We’ve found that consumers pirate NOT because they want to but because they’re often forced to by an increasingly complex and fragmented streaming landscape that was built for companies, not users,” Tim Cutting of Reelgood notes.

Sebastian Kramer, SVP Product Management at NAGRA, also mentions fragmentation as one of the key problems the entertainment industry faces today.

“With an increasingly fragmented content landscape as content owners range direct-to-consumer services, piracy is soaring. Ultimately, consumers are looking for content, so we all need to focus on the best, aggregated approaches to allow this to happen,” Kramer says.

In large part, these quotes come from people who have a significant stake in the anti-piracy ecosystem. However, it is clear that the media industry isn’t oblivious to the ‘streaming fatigue’ of the broader public. And seeing it discussed openly at a conference, shows that the problem is taken seriously.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Over the past decades, the entertainment industries have tried out numerous anti-piracy messages.

One of the most iconic videos is without doubt the “ You Wouldn’t Steal a Car ” campaign, which proved to be a fertile breeding ground for memes, satire, and ridicule.

The ‘You Wouldn’t’ video is an extreme example but anti-piracy messages on the whole often miss the mark. They tend to exaggerate losses, focus on external threats such as malware, or paint a dystopian future where cinemas go out of business and all actors lose their jobs.

These types of messages may work well for the top Hollywood executives but they fail to make an impact on most casual pirates. According to a new paper published by the ESSCA School of Management, there are some key behavioral insights that explain common mistakes in anti-piracy campaigns.

The paper titled; “Doing more with less: Behavioral insights for antipiracy messages”, lists three common errors. This includes the tendency of campaign creators to stack a combination of stronger and weaker arguments in a single campaign.

More is Not Always Better

The general assumption of many people is that, by adding more arguments, the message will be more compelling. That’s called the ‘more-is-better’ heuristic but behavioral research has shown that the opposite is often true.

When many arguments are presented together, the stronger ones may actually be diluted by weaker ones. So, referencing malware, fines, low quality, Internet disconnections, and losses to the industry, all while associating piracy with organized crime, is not the best idea.

The reduced impact of stronger and weaker arguments is also one of the reasons why the “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” campaign didn’t work as planned, the researchers suggest.

“The most striking example might be the (in)famous ‘You would not steal a car’ awareness video aired in cinemas and on DVDs worldwide during the 2000s. It compared downloading a movie to various forms of stealing, including reasonably relevant ones (stealing a DVD in a store) and somewhat absurd others (stealing handbags, TVs, cars), which diluted down the message.”

Numbers and Victims

Anti-piracy campaigns can also focus too much on dry numbers without putting these into context. While these statistics are vital to the industry, the average pirate will simply gloss over them.

This ‘mistake’ can also be explained by behavioral psychology, which has shown that people identify more with a problem or victim if they feel some kind of personal connection. That’s often missing from anti-piracy messages.

The researchers show an example from the UK “Get it Right from a Genuine Site” campaign that focuses on dry statistics without a personal touch. The message reads as follows:

“Intellectual property industries, like film, music, television and computer software, are central to the health and stability of the UK economy. The UK’s creative industry supports around 2.8 million UK jobs each year, contributes about £18 billion in exports around the world and contributes about £10 million per hour to the UK economy.”

It’s worth noting that not all personal messaging is effective either. The paper mentions an Indian anti-piracy campaign where famous Bollywood actors urged people not to download films illegally, equating piracy to theft.

However, the Indian public probably has little sympathy for the potential “losses” incurred by these multi-millionaire actors. In fact, the anti-piracy campaign may be seen as an extra motivation to pirate.

“All videos starred well-known actors, whose net worth is estimated to be $22–$400 million dollars, in a country where the annual per capita income is a bit less than $2,000.

“This can offer to pirates a moral justification: they only steal the rich to ‘feed the poor’, a form of ‘Robin Hood effect’ that makes even more sense with some cultural or sport-related goods,” the researchers add.

Don’t Emphasize How Popular Piracy Is

Piracy is a widespread and global phenomenon. This makes it particularly problematic for copyright holders but emphasizing this issue in anti-piracy messages isn’t a good idea.

This is the third mistake that’s highlighted in the article. By pointing out that people are supposed to get content legally while at the same time showing that many people don’t, people might actually be encouraged to pirate.

Behavioral research has shown that people often prefer to follow the descriptive norm (what people do) rather than the injunctive one (what the law prescribes).

“Informing directly or indirectly individuals that many people pirate is counterproductive and encourages piracy by driving the targeted individuals to behave similarly. These messages provide to the would-be pirates the needed rationalization by emphasizing that ‘everyone is doing it’,” the researchers write.

Food for Thought

All in all the paper provides plenty of food for thought for anti-piracy campaigners. The overall message is to pay more attention to behavioral insights to make sure that the messaging actually works.

In some cases, campaigners are already incorporating this knowledge, intentionally or not. That can lead to subtle but convincing PSAs, as we have previously highlighted . The video below, on the other hand, is less likely to make an impact.

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Full citation: Gilles Grolleau & Luc Meunier (2022) Doing more with less: Behavioral insights for anti-piracy messages, The Information Society, DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2022.2095683

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.