Mark Lichtenhein, CEO, Sports Rights Owners Coalition said piracy was simply organised crime
A leading broadcaster has said a handful of organisations are responsible for a huge percentage of piracy.
Lee Kent, Content Protection Manager, beIN Media Group, told an IBC event organised by Friend MTS that when you began to track down the pirates they would be based in places such as Panama and the Seychelles where there is no legal mechanism for private entities.
There had been successes, such as during the last football World Cup, where the pirates were unable to move quick enough to cover their tracks. “They pivoted so quickly from attempts to steal the content and actually forgotten to hide their user agents and their referrals. So, in our logs we were seeing Pirate sources like pirate123.com and then slowly but surely build up multiple IPs against a CDN to try and commit a DoS attack.”
Mark Lichtenhein, CEO, SROC (Sports Rights Owners Coalition) said piracy was simply organised crime, the third largest money generator for the criminals after drug trafficking and people trafficking in terms of revenue.
Lichtenhein expressed frustration at the interpretation of expeditious within European and US copyrights acts. “Nobody really knows how long expeditious is. And when it comes to sport, that’s a critical issue. For some people, expeditious might mean the next working day. We often get this from intermediaries who get noticed and take down orders that, well, we don’t work at the weekend, so we’ll deal with it on Monday morning,” he said. “Well, most sport happens at the weekend, so Monday mornings, no good. The value’s already been extracted.”
Lichtenhein said piracy in Europe could be pinpointed down to 50 data centres that were at the heart of the problem.
Former police officer David Gilmore, now VP Intelligence for Friend MTS, agreed with the analysis of pirates being organised crime. “The money flows do feed into other crime types. I’ve seen that myself. But also the structure of how pirates operate, high degree of expertise in certain roles, coming together in a cell type structure for monetary gain. Sounds like organized crime from me.”
Gilmore said the company had detected over 9 million instances of piracy, often charging up to $20 a month. Other models included advertising for illegal gambling and pornography, and even pirates ‘stealing’ the content of other pirates.
