AI will turbo-charge the battle with content pirates
AI will turbo-charge the technology battle between content pirates and anti-piracy solution providers tasked with stopping them, such as Friend MTS (FMTS).
Robin Boldon, head of product at FMTS (pictured left), says AI will encourage automated content theft.
“We will be increasingly fighting automated agents built by criminals with strong cybersecurity backgrounds,” he warns.
Pirates will use AI to find vulnerabilities that help them crack DRM (digital rights management) keys, break into CDNs or exploit streaming latency, among many other things.
The good news is that using AI for scaled professional piracy is expensive, but the content industry must prepare its counter-attack.
Boldon says AI will help Friend MTS monitor and analyse pirate streams more intelligently. The company says it will be able to identify threats 70% faster thanks to AI.
Despite AI making manual ripping easier, Friend MTS believes anti-piracy technology (backed by better industry collaboration to enforce rights compliance) will force the ‘give it a go’ amateurs to give up in the years ahead.
However, the battle with the professionals will be long and hard.
This will require the next generation of AI, plus regulatory measures to compel all infrastructure providers (such as data centres and server providers) to respond quickly to pirate-stream takedown notices.
FMTS is hoping that European and US copyright acts will be updated this year to require more than just ‘expeditious’ takedowns, which could be days after a live event ended.
FMTS has identified 50 data centres in Europe that it believes are the heart of this continent’s piracy problem.
The danger is that these, or others, will establish themselves as ‘safe haven’ providers for pirate services. George Demetriades, strategic content protection and data lead at FMTS (above right) calls these ‘bullet-proof hosts’.
Bullet-proof pirate hosts
He says there has already been a dramatic uptick in the number of hosting providers who advertise their resistance to effective enforcement.
“The utilisation of bullet-proof hosting companies by pirate operations will increase as more effective anti-piracy operations are devised and executed – and celebrated,” he says.
A bulletproof hoster may try to hide its true location, like pretending it is outside Europe when it is not, so the content industry is less sure it can enforce compliance.
They may look for jurisdictions that lack the laws or the will to enforce intellectual property law.
To beat a bullet-proof hoster, anti-piracy companies like FMTS can use network forensics to see how they have constructed their infrastructure and delivery mechanism.
According to Boldon, “We look at the path the content takes from hosting provider to user but also investigate where they are getting their own upstream services.
“Their suppliers may be legitimate multinational companies who are compliant [ready to uphold intellectual property rights].”
Boldon says initiatives in the EU could force streaming infrastructure providers to undertake some due diligence on who their customers are, too.
“We have seen large-scale hosting providers allowing bills for millions of Euros to be paid on a prepaid credit card or with cryptocurrency.
“The hosting business does not know who those people are.”
Another approach could be dynamic IP address blocking. Demetriades reckons that more territories will allow this, as they recognise the limits of cease-and-desist enforcement.
Transcending all this, the industry needs coordinated action among rights holders and distributors (such as pay-TV providers, broadcasters, and studios).
Shared industry responsibility
They must share the responsibility for ending piracy, rather than leaving it to others. This has already happened, Boldon points out.
Multi-jurisdictional investigations could provide a tonic for rights holders. These ensure robust evidence collection – treating pirates like any other criminals.
Dave Gilmore, VP of intelligence at Friend MTS, reckons this will be normal by the end of the decade.
He believes the revenue losses from piracy will be too high for governments and law enforcement agencies to ignore a decade from now.
And if governments are not swayed by the money (and the contribution media and entertainment make to economies), maybe they will want to diminish the organised crime groups (OCGs) that benefit from the trade in illegal content.
The big message from content rights advocates and anti-piracy providers currently is that streaming piracy is a major revenue source for OCGs. These are groups also involved in human trafficking, cyber-crime and drug smuggling.
Gilmore predicts this is the year when authorities at least acknowledge the threat of piracy-based malware, which is subjecting users to cybercrime and fraud.
Photo background: Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash