🎥 Can We End Piracy?
Piracy has been costing the entertainment industry billions every year. Can we put an end to it?
Who doesn't love free stuff?
It's our love of free stuff that makes us buy things we don't even need at a buy one get one free sale.
And sometimes, because of our love of free stuff, some of us are even ready to bend the law.
Yes, we're talking about piracy.
Many are guilty of having downloaded that new film or our favourite song off of the internet for free.
But while most of us don't even bat an eyelid before donning our pirate hats and surfing torrents, this has a major impact on the TV and film industry.
💸 The Impact of Piracy
That's how much the global film industry loses due to piracy each year, with Indian media losing around $2.8 billion.
With Covid, these losses have only deepened.
As all of us were stuck at home during lockdowns and had limited money to spend, many people took to downloading and watching content illegally.
Result? Piracy rose by 63% in the last week of March 2020.
A major contributor to this increase is also the popularity of apps like Telegram, which have made downloading illegal content much much easier than it was before.
In fact, the app has entire channels dedicated to providing people fast access to links of movies that have just released.
And even though the pandemic is over this trend has only continued, hurting theatres and films, which were already badly affected by the lockdowns.
So, what is being done about this?
☠️Stopping Pirates in Their Tracks
Though this may not be good news for many, a lot of active steps are being taken to stop piracy.
For instance, Google recently sent a cease and desist letter to Vanced, a platform that allowed you to block ads from YouTube without buying a premium subscription.
India has also introduced new and strict rules for virtual private networks (VPNs), which are very commonly used for pirating content.
You see, these networks are basically like functioning entirely in incognito mode but better. When you are using VPNs nobody can track your location or your computer's IP address and you can access websites that may be banned in your country.
A lot of people use this to access torrent sites that the government has banned.
But now India is making it impossible for private VPN providers to exist.
The government is asking them to keep a record of all their users, their contact info and details for a period of 5 years.
Not only will this be very costly for VPN providers, but it will also defeat their whole purpose which is privacy.
Now, this wasn't done expressly to stop piracy (the main aim was to prevent and track cybercrime and ensure national security), but it will help slow it down.
However, one of the major blows to privacy has been a company called MassBunk Antipiracy.
It has been working since 2017 to stop the circulation of pirated download links of movies.
The company majorly works with the South Indian film industry.
In fact, it was created to prevent the industry from the financial losses caused by the piracy site TamilRockers, which leaked footage of Tamil movies.
🤔 How Does MassBunk Work?
One of the major problems with stopping piracy is finding pirated links. Thanks to copyright laws, once such links are identified and reported, they can be taken down.
So, MassBunk created a tool which can identify pirated links of an upcoming movie across platforms.
And for MassBunk the process becomes much easier as it only works to prevent piracy of a few movies at a time instead of stopping piracy in general.
MassBunk's tool has so far removed lakhs of pirated links of over 200 movies, the latest being the South Indian movie Vikram, which managed to bag Rs. 350 crores on the box office.
In fact, MassBunk could be one major reason why South Indian movies are performing so well in recent times.
But while it is helping the film industry, the piracy problem as a whole still looms large.
🤷♀️ Why Piracy Will Still Continue
Despite companies cracking down on torrent websites and making content more easily available nowadays, piracy has not gone down.
And it probably will not any time soon.
You see, there are just too many OTT services, all with exclusive content.
Thanks to this, no one site will have all the content you want to watch.
And even if the subscription prices may seem on the lower side globally (thanks subscription wars), for many Indians it is simply not feasible to subscribe to so many OTT services.
So, they end up resorting to piracy.
What companies need to do is either lower subscription fees, or introduce packages that allow them to bundle up subscription services.
And with more and more movies also going for OTT releases now, the film industry will also benefit from this move.
Faster OTT releases of movies could also help.
While this will certainly reduce piracy, it will probably never end.
Because like we said, everyone loves free stuff.
⚡ In a line: Piracy has been eating into the entertainment industry’s profits since forever but new tech and stricter rules are now trying to reduce this.
💡 Quick question: Do you think we can ever completely outlaw piracy and should we?
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