Now that millions of ordinary, non-geeky families are routinely downloading TV shows and movies without a second thought, digital piracy has clearly gone mainstream. Download this paper to learn methods for preventing video piracy.
Turning the tide
Why new strategies are urgently needed to counter the surge in online video piracy
. Movie theft
. TV piracy
. Peer-to-peer networks
. Digital copyright
"It's a disturbing thought that
more than 60% of all Internet
use is now accounted for by
peer-to-peer traffic."
Envisional Ltd, Betjeman House, 104 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 1LQ Telephone: +44 1223 372400 fax: +44 1223 372401 Web: www.envisional.com The hidd en world deep below the web FFrreeeeddoomm,, lliicceennccee oorr ppiirraaccyy?? The number of people and transactions on Every day of the week, up to 8 million users across North America the "deep Internet" is and Europe connect up to free online services that let them share growing all the time.
movies and TV shows. This is the land beyond the World Wide Web, way beyond the reach It may be illegal under most countries' copyright laws, but that of the search engines. doesn't stop them. Another few million video pirates are doing It is a high-tech realm of peer-to-peer file exactly the same thing every day in developing markets with high sharing networks and Internet usage, such as China and India. encrypted protocols, private portals and That's an awful lot of sales slipping down the drain. One person's indexing sites, secretive newsgroups freedom to pirate is another person's loss of royalty revenue. and Internet relay chat channels. Piracy hits the box office takings for new movies and directly It is largely invisible threatens other important revenue streams, such as DVD sales and often ignored - to and rentals and a whole range of TV rights. their cost - by the copyright owners who For the Hollywood studios, these other outlets typically represent have most to lose. the lion's share of a film's takings. And for TV companies, losing Yet, for all its technical complexity, it has audience share to the Internet has an immediate impact, hitting become part of the lives of millions of viewing figures and lowering advertising revenue. ordinary people. It's hard to be precise about the total losses sustained by content They go there to download free copies owners. But there's no doubt that they are substantial already and of music, TV shows still growing fast. These days, Hollywood's annual revenues are and Hollywood movies. And while their actions between $60 and $70 billion, with only a fraction - a little under obviously involve $10 billion - coming directly from traditional cinema releases. How consuming copyrighted products without to combat online piracy is now, quite literally, the $64 billion paying the creators for the right to do so, they question. simply do not see what they do as piracy. An accelerating trend Broadband is here to stay, with over half of all home Internet connections in the US. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, 95 million Americans now have broadband Internet access at home. And over 35 million of them already use the Internet to download music or video.
The situation is much the same in other countries. After all, in broadband terms the US is far from leading the pack. Broadband penetration rates are significantly higher in many non-US markets,
BitTorrent: All for one and both Europe and the Asia Pacific region represent larger total and one for all numbers of subscribers. BitTorrent is a truly revolutionary idea. At the same time, another key barrier to video file sharing - Normal peer-to-peer overloaded servers and slow transfers - has been overcome by interaction works on some ingenious new software originally devised for quite a the one-to-one model - one person who wants different purpose. piratedvideo.avi downloads it from one BitTorrent was designed by a well-meaning technologist to allow other person who already has the file. open source software to be offered for download without landing But with BitTorrent, people with huge bandwidth bills. Now BitTorrent is being used to everyone who wants make the copying of films and other entertainment material quick this video becomes part of a huge... [download for more]
