Pursuing pirates of the Web

Pirating and spreading content illegally is not an easy job any more. Film industry is hiring anti-piracy companies to save their content and combat against the pirates and to bring people to theatres.

Any major film will have an average of 1,000 downloads in one metropolitan city in a day. Taking a ticket cost of `100, the industry is almost losing about `1 lakh in a City a day. The downloaded content is being shared with friends both online and offline resulting further losses to the industry, said Bhaskar Anand, CEO and MD, MavenClickZ Media.

A new film is downloaded and viewed online from 2.5 lakh to 5 lakh times from almost 2,000 different sites. If industry can bring at least half of them for a theatre by curtailing piracy, it can add huge revenues. Broadband penetration and internet speeds have pushed the growth of online piracy even in Tier 2 cities, said Harish Ram, CEO, Copyright Labs.

The online anti-piracy companies have evolved as saviours of the industry. Typically charging `60,000- `5 lakh per month to track and curtail piracy depending on the budget of the film.

“We use multiple ways to curtail piracy like uploading files with same film names on different sites. A user with 512 Kbps internet speed waits for almost four hours to download the film and eventually see nothing in the file. This will affect the whole ecosystem of downloading and user will not go for it next time,” said Bhaskar.

Though many major sites like Piratebay were blocked by court orders, users can easily access these sites with numerous proxy servers.

Few file sharing sites have started previewing of the file before downloading, letting the user identify what he is downloading. However, 10 Mbps internet speeds are making user not to wait for more than 15 minutes to download a film of 1 GB size.

The anonymous are also making their agitations intense for the rights of internet freedom. Some of the anti-piracy companies fear of anonymous attacks and uses encryption and multi level security for their database.

“As of now, we can significantly reduce the illegal film downloads and online views by tracking and getting the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of file sharing sites and the users who are sharing the content through peer to peer networks. We keep on updating our data about the IP addresses of these file sharing sites, where the films are uploaded and try to block them. The old laws are making us difficult to attain complete eradication of piracy,” he said.

However, things are getting better to curtail the piracy. The anti-piracy company does not need to file the papers and wait for the orders of the court to act against the website. John Doe order is an order given by a court before release of the film to act against probable offenders. With these orders, the internet service providers (ISPs) are acting promptly against the websites and the proxy servers to curtail the piracy. We will apply for these orders for every film that we monitor in the near future, said Harish Ram.

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Category: Business, Business News