Content executives and anti-piracy experts in Asia named applications like Telegram and sites like Loklok as among some of the worst offenders for piracy in the region, and called on intellectual property owners to take a more proactive approach toward filing takedown requests for pirated content.
Hermawan Sutanto, COO of Vidio, said that one of the biggest challenges is that for content that Vidio licenses (and does not own), his team is unable to file takedown requests — only IP owners can do this.
On the other side, Euan Smith, Group CEO of Malaysia’s broadcasting conglomerate Astro, said that one IP owner has set a particularly positive example in the anti-piracy space in Asia: the English Premier League (EPL).
“The poster child is EPL, as they have a team on the ground and are extremely proactive in protecting EPL rights,” said Smith. “There are some who don’t care that their content are arriving on Malaysian shores for free.”
Smith added that Google has also been one of the best partners.
“They allow us to do real-time takedown,” said Smith. “Other players have us waiting for two weeks to submit all the paperwork and content ownership documents.”
Indonesia’s Vidio owns live sports rights too, which are particularly susceptible to piracy — and Sutanto emphasized that this has proved particularly costly.
“Piracy is the number one show-stopper for us,” said Sutanto. “We would like to get more support from IP owners and studios to be more proactive, to keep submitting the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] requests.”
However, content pirates have also become more sophisticated with their methods.
“Recently, we found that the pirates also know how to counter the DMCA. What happens is, when we submit the DMCA, the pirates will counter with a fake agreement, saying that they have the license,” added Sutanto.
Sutanto said that another recent and sophisticated challenge on the anti-piracy front is the rise of IPTV players and Android boxes. “They can have access to thousands of free channels across the globe and legally, IPTV is not against the law, but it is facilitating piracy,” said Sutanto.
Sutanto shared that the demand for pirated content in Indonesia is worryingly high, citing a survey which found that in terms of audience preferences, 70% of respondents prefer to watch pirated content if available.
Chris White, chief architect of anti-piracy and cybersecurity firm Friend MTS, added: “These content owners have to do global monitoring enforcement. They can mandate licensees protect their content better and have secure implementations.”
White added that content owners can help licensees protect their IP better through means like subscriber watermarking and blocking — with the latter particularly effective for live sports.
“A lot of good progress has been made in blocking, preventing users from certain territories or geographies from accessing the content,” said White. “There are different levels of advancement in different places, and putting in the legislation in place that supports blocking.”
Neil Gane, vice-president and head of APAC of IP House, said that the industry and governments have to address both the demand for and supply of pirated content.
On reducing the demand for pirated content, Gane says, “It’s really about having the right message with the right messenger. The right messenger would vary from territory to territory — it could be the government, celebrities, or others. We’ve seen that it does resonate for consumers to better understand the very real nexus between piracy, very egregious malware and the close connections with organized crime groups.”
Smith similarly emphasized the links between piracy and other forms of organized crime.
“Piracy is not considered to be theft by many, sometimes it’s even seen as clever. We have to fix the perception that it is not a victimless crime. This is about livelihoods,”said Smith. “The other point is that people need a real sense of fear with this, that many of these boxes and apps are full of malware and six months later, your identity or bank details may be stolen.”
Gane also said that on the national level, both the economic damage of piracy as well as economic benefit of piracy prevention have to be highlighted.
One big word for him in the anti-piracy space is “collaboration,” where multi-jurisdictional enforcement and collaborations between governments and industry are effective means to curb the sting of content piracy.
