EUIPO Study Indicates It's Likely That Piracy Traffic Has Decreased Significantly, Even During The Pandemic

from the problem-solved? dept

Back in April of 2020, which feels roughly like a damned lifetime ago, we discussed a much-publicized report that indicated explosive growth in traffic to pirate torrent and streaming sites for movies, music, television, and video games. Much hand-wringing ensued, which was largely silly. All kinds of media consumption traffic rose during the initial lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic and it only made sense that piracy traffic would follow suit, particularly when you consider the broader economic impact of the pandemic. This wasn't some new paradigm shift in the piracy landscape; it was literally one of the most predictable things that could have happened.

But now, almost two years later, where are we at? Well, per a recent study by the EU Intellectual Property Office, piracy traffic hasn't just fallen, it's fallen sharply.

New research published by the European Union Intellectual Property Office shows that, despite the pandemic, piracy site visits continue to fall. This trend is visible for movies, TV shows, and music, with the latter showing the sharpest drop. Income level and inequality appear to be major piracy drivers, but there's a major caveat as well.

We'll get into that caveat more a bit later, but it's worth pointing out that all the data for this report comes from MUSO. MUSO is an anti-piracy outfit, albeit one that isn't afraid to embrace some new and interesting ideas. Still, as an organization that is certainly not incentivized to play down piracy numbers. And, yet, the numbers do indicate a significant trend downward.

The chart below shows that the piracy numbers roughly halved between 2017 and 2020. This trend is visible for all content categories and most pronounced for music, which dropped by more than 80% during this time period.

These data also reveal that TV piracy is by far the most common. This could in part be due to the recurring nature of TV shows. At the end of 2020, roughly 70% of all pirate site visits were TV-related. The film and music categories are good for 20% and 10% respectively.

The COVID boom was either never a thing, or it was so short-lived that it basically isn't worth talking about. This tracks with other pandemic related effects on the nation, such as the stock market crash that then came roaring back almost immediately. Humans, as it turns out, are perfectly capable of wild swings of behavior and outlook when pressured by a historic event.

But the overall downward trend over recent years is very easy to explain: streaming. As the public gets more and more comfortable with utilizing streaming services in order to get the content they want, services that are often well-priced and easy to use, the desire for piracy goes down. For $50 a month across several streaming services I can get nearly all the content I want? Fine, then no need to engage in risky or even non-risky pirate behavior.

Now, about that caveat...

The study really only covers a part of the broader piracy landscape. The focus on web traffic means that apps, streaming devices, and IPTV services are not included either. Perhaps that’s where some mobile users are going?

This caveat may also shed a different light on the piracy drop, as these untracked piracy channels have grown explosively in recent years. According to some, these streaming tools are the largest piracy threat at the moment.

And perhaps there is some truth to that, though it feels quite unlikely that IPTV services explain the global drop of piracy levels across the board. TV and movies are one thing, but IPTV doesn't factor into music or video game piracy in any serious way. But Spotify and subscription based gaming services certainly do.

So if the trend is that piracy is on the significant downswing, you would think we'd see the IP industries ratchet down the rhetoric on the evils of piracy. Somehow, I cannot quite convince myself to hold my breath on that one.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, movies, piracy, streaming, tv
Companies: muso

Anti-Piracy Outfit MUSO Comes Out Against The Use Of DRM

from the huh dept

When it comes to the record of anti-piracy outfit MUSO, based in the UK, you get a mixed-bag. On the one hand, the organization was caught patting itself on the back for the number of takedowns of infringing content it had achieved, when the number it was touting was made up in some sizable percentage of the number of takedown requests it had issued. The focus at all on takedowns as a method for combating piracy, rather than the development of better business models that take advantage of the internet, is itself a problem. On the other hand, MUSO has also been willing to tell content publishers that piracy is by and large their fault, with a lack of convenient legal alternatives being the biggest barrier to ending copyright infringement. So, a little bad, a little good.

Well, we can add another item to the good column, as MUSO recently came out on its own site with a piece that essentially argues that DRM should be abandoned completely. And, while the alternative on offer in the post is more takedown efforts, MUSO is at least trying to frame this as an argument for better treatment of consumers.

Regardless of the truth about performance, software bloat, and connectivity issues – the strength of feeling in the gaming community is huge. DRM is accused of being anti-consumer, and are perceived as being to the detriment of player experience. For game studios, it’s a very quick way to alienate your target market.

It’s also like a red flag to a bull and, once a game is released with DRM, hackers quickly get to work to crack it. Typically this takes a little while but, as Capcom recently discovered, the hackers are getting faster. Released on 8th March, the game was cracked and pirated within hours. With this precedent set, combined with the frustration it induces in players, is DRM really worth it?

Of course it isn't. We've been saying this for years. When DRM's biggest success story, Denuvo, has been completely neutered down to cracking timelines of days upon a game's release, what the hell is the point?

And, again, while MUSO's solution on offer is more takedown efforts that also haven't proved to be adequately successful, the organization is at least trying to guide publishers down a path that doesn't create a war with legitimate customers.

Games studios and distributors need to protect their content online, and take a stand against piracy, but the chosen strategy should not undermine the core product or hijack the conversation around a release. Gaming creates huge and passionate fan bases which need to be nurtured; fans should not be left feeling as though their gameplay is being hindered.

With immediate availability of cracks to work-around DRM, and hackers choosing to proactively target releases using DRM, it’s time to change the conversation. Content protection strategies should be non-invasive and data-driven. Rather than embedding mechanisms within the games themselves, studios can effectively remove illegal content as it appears by crawling for copies.

While it would surely be nice to see a group like MUSO progress this conversation beyond re-hashed takedown strategies and into one in which innovation of gaming business models is at the forefront, it must also be said that nothing in the above text is wholly unreasonable. With anti-piracy efforts typically only being framed in one direction -- with more and more restrictions and technology used to hamper pirates, but which instead only seem to piss off customers -- seeing a MUSO come out against DRM is a welcome sign of change.

Filed Under: drm
Companies: muso

Music Group Cheers On Its Own Fake Antipiracy Victories

from the fake-it-until-you-make-it dept

There's an old saying in statistics: figures don't lie, but liars figure. Nowhere is this more the case than when you hear numbers streaming from the mouths of those in the anti-piracy business and copyright industries. Examples of this are legion, from the infamous practice of Hollywood accounting rendering hilariously successful films to red-ink status, to bogus piracy costs, to industry claims that rely on every download being a lost sale, to the overall prevalence of piracy statistics more generally speaking. While MUSO, the antipiracy outfit out of Europe, has made some recent noise about copyright holders tweaking their business models to reduce piracy instead of whining about, it has also participated in this liars-figuring practice.

A great example of that can be found in MUSO's recent partnership with the Association of Independent Music (AIM), where the latter has put out a press release about just how much great work MUSO has performed in taking down pirated content in the past four months.

This week AIM sent out a press release showing how much has been achieved over the past four months. The results, shared by AIM’s Head of Legal & Business Affairs Gee Davy are impressive indeed.

“AIM’s partnership with MUSO began in May this year, and to see 5 million takedowns achieved already reflects the speed and efficiency with which MUSO has covered the catalogs across the independent music community,” Davy notes. “Our members report that they are delighted with the service, which not only protects their releases from online piracy, but creates a visual dashboard to track piracy and protection activity in real time.”

Those are big, impressive sounding numbers that are designed to relay to AIM membership just how much of an effect the partnership with MUSO is having. And, were you simply reading this as an AIM member, you can imagine being quite pleased. To have 5 million takedowns of pirated content occur over four months is going to have an effect, even if it's still largely a game of whac-a-mole.

Unfortunately, actually looking at the results these numbers are based on results in the realization that this is all bullshit spin and not at all representing the actual result AIM is touting in its release.

The press release doesn’t mention it, but, from what we can see, the five million takedown requests were (nearly) all targeted at Google. This means that no infringing content was taken down there, only search results. Looking more closely at all the takedown requests MUSO sent to Google, on behalf of AIM, an even more disturbing picture emerges.

Google’s Transparency Report confirms that AIM sent close to five million ‘pirate’ URLs to the search engine. However, as it turns out, the vast majority of all reported URLs were not removed. And for a good reason. Most of the links that were reported are simply not in Google’s search index. So, logically, there is nothing to remove.

In other words, that 5 million number isn't successful takedowns of infringing content, nor is it even successful takedowns of Google search results. Instead, it appears that some sizable percentage of that 5 million number is simply the number of takedown requests sent out to Google to delist search results. And, were that not enough, it seems that this is all part of some automated takedown notice system that isn't even necessarily tied to actual infringing content that exists for Google to index. TorrentFreak went through the results and searched against torrent sites to search for the actual infringing content that would correspond with the search index removed. In many, many cases, no such infringing content exists.

As mentioned before, these links were never indexed by Google. However, even the torrent site in question doesn’t return any infringing content, as the searches in question return no results.  The above suggests that most of these takedown efforts are rather pointless. The URLs are not in Google’s index and even if they were, many would not point to infringing content.

To us, it appears that many of these notices are automatically generated by using variations of search strings on pirate sites, whether these point to actual pirated content or not.

So if figures don't lie but liars figure, AIM is very squarely in the liars category. Waving a "mission accomplished" banner for results that can be characterized as "rather pointless" is the sort of thing that ought to really piss off AIM members. And, frankly, cause them call into question just how important any of this anti-piracy activity is to begin with. MUSO, for its part, sure ought to be pushing back against this Press Release if wants to retain any of its own credibility.

Filed Under: antipiracy, copyright, dmca, search, takedowns
Companies: aim, google, muso

MUSO, Of All Groups, Tells Copyright Holders To Get Their Shit Together And Treat Pirates Like The Customers They Are

from the about-time dept

While the copyright industries love to frame so-called "pirates" as nefarious freeloaders who simply want to consume content for free, it's been an open secret for some time now that these freeloaders are often outspending non-infringers on entertainment across the spectrum. Despite this clear indication that piracy is largely a problem of under-served customers, industry groups like the RIAA still prefer to play pretend with these obvious business metrics. The end result of this is that industry and anti-piracy groups essentially advocate for the attack of their constituents' best customers, which ought to be about as insane a thing as one can imagine.

But perhaps the tide is turning. An indication of that would be MUSO, the piracy-tracking group, essentially telling copyright industries to get their shit together and finally treat pirates like the great customers they tend to be. The report is based on a MUSO survey showing that 60% of UK citizens admit to engaging in copyright infringement, except the overwhelming majority of those "pirates" first tried, and failed, to get that content legally.

Of all the people surveyed the vast majority, 60 percent, admitted that they illegally streamed or downloaded music, film or TV-shows in the past. This could have been yesterday or even two years ago. Interestingly, the same pirates often try legal sources first. In fact, 83 percent say they usually try to find what they are looking for through official channels before trying anything else. This suggests that most pirates are also legal consumers.

“The entertainment industry tends to envisage piracy audiences as a criminal element, and writes them off as money lost – but they are wrong to do so,” says Paul Briley, CCO of MUSO, commenting on the findings. “The reality is that the majority of people who have gone through the effort of finding and accessing such unlicensed content are, first and foremost, fans – fans who are more often than not trying to get content legally if they can.”

First, a slow golf clap for MUSO finally getting what we've been saying for years. But a more sincere applause should be directed at MUSO, a piracy tracking outfit, turning the tables on the copyright holders that often use its reports to decry modernity, holding them accountable for what has always been a business model issue. Based on the same survey, the majority of pirates gave up on legit sourcing for content when they either could not find the content they wanted legally, or found that it was "siloed" in a service to which they do not subscribe. Barely a third indicated that cost or money had anything to do with it.

Sort of blows the whole "pirates just want stuff for free" thing out of the water, doesn't it? Not to mention that these "pirates", who supposedly want everything for free, spend a shit-ton of money on non-free entertainment.

MUSO’s survey reveals that 91% of all pirates already have a streaming subscription, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify or Apple Music. That’s more than their non-pirating counterparts, of which less than 80% subscribe to one of these services.

The problem is that people sometimes need over a dozen separate subscriptions to access all the content they want. There’s no single service that offers everything in one place. This is one of the main reasons why piracy is still very relevant.

If the copyright industries wanted to change the piracy landscape in an instant, they need only slay the monster that is delivery fragmentation. People are perfectly willing to pay for content, but the monetary and mental costs of incorporating five different streaming services, and then having to search across all of those services for a particular piece of content, falls prey to the ease of piracy. And that ease is exactly what the content industries should either be selling themselves, or partnering with others to sell, because that convenience is the product.

If nothing else, the mantra of piracy being about freeloaders should be dead.

Filed Under: copyright, fans, pirates
Companies: muso