How the Anti-Piracy Department at START Is Set Up and How It Works
Generally speaking, we are fighting piracy. Our department has several focus areas. The first one is working with search engines, pirate sites, their administrators, and hosting providers. The bottom line is that most users find pirated content through search engines. Our main goal is to reduce the traffic from search engines as much as possible because they are the main source. One of the teams in the department does this: we collect search results, visit particular sites and pages, check if they have our pirated content, and decide what to do with them — block them or leave them alone, let them live. Now some of the processes are automated, we can semi-automatically monitor these sites and immediately identify pirated content.
After we find a pirated link and confirm that it has our content, and we can block it, we send a complaint to the registry under the memorandum, which means we remove the links from the search results. The memorandum is an agreement between copyright holders and search engines that enables us to remove links from search results faster than we would be able to otherwise. And according to the rules of some search engines, we need to get a court order for each link. This is unrealistic due to the sheer number of links on different titles found every day. And after we send the links to the memorandum registry, they are removed from the output fairly quickly.
We do not stop at this point and make an effort to contact the pirate site’s administrator and hosting provider, from whom they rent servers, etc, directly. Hosting providers are often in the jurisdiction of the European Union or the United States. These providers are very tough on copyright infringement, and in most cases they prefer to drop an offending pirate rather than risk their reputation, so they respond very quickly to complaints from copyright holders. The provider then contacts the pirate and demands that they remove the violation or risk having their resource blocked without refund — this works well. And after that, we can communicate with the webmaster directly and not through the hosting provider. We request the removal directly, and this way they are more willing to cooperate. Sometimes they don’t want to talk to us at first, but as soon as they sense trouble, they respond.
Eliminating piracy completely is a rather idealistic goal, so we focus on practical measures. If someone wants to pirate, they will find a way. Our audience is not like that — they want quality service without ads, casinos, bets, and banners during movies, but they may not know about us. By cutting off traffic, we can redirect users to our service and offer them an enjoyable and legitimate viewing experience.
Another team deals with content on social networks. Each social network has its own tools and rules to fight piracy, and staff who respond to complaints and block content. We cover all popular social media platforms: Telegram, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, VK, and DailyMotion (French YouTube that does not have many users, but sometimes our videos appear there). Now we have also streamlined certain processes there. Before we had to find a link to a pirated video, manually write a letter or fill out a complaint form, now the staff finds a pirated video, puts the link to the interface, and it is checked for “white lists” to ensure it is not our legal group. Then, an automated letter is sent. We search for pirated content in the same way a regular user would, such as through a VK video search query. This allows us to cover the most popular videos. If resources permit, we dig deeper. In VK there are groups that hide content from public access, publishing videos with the names of the titles, but written in Latin for example, and then the search will not work. We know how to catch that too.
Our third area of work is the content protection group. It has a team that does content fingerprinting. This is basically the same work with social networks, but a bit more automated, meaning that we create a video fingerprint, upload it on Youtube and other platforms, and then all the matches on such videos are blocked automatically. There is also a team in this group that deals with organizational support. Generally speaking, the whole protection of a title starts with us getting the paperwork for a movie or series, and we collect the input data: title, description, actors, etc., so that we can correctly identify the content. They also manage the scheduling of colleagues in the department.
And another area we are now developing is open-source intelligence (OSINT). We find a pirated resource and then from open sources we try to collect information about the owners, administrators, advertising partners, and their request processing service. We find out everything, down to each individual, and then we try to determine the best course of action to prevent our content from reappearing on these platforms. In some cases, we may pass on this information to law enforcement. We may also see that some payment service is attached to the platform, which is legal in principle, but makes money from illegal activities, so may file a complaint against this payment service or to the Central Bank. We have even used leaked passwords from other databases to identify the owner of the pirate resource, meaning the password contained the username from a car forum, and we used it to find a particular individual. Once we have gathered all relevant information, we determine the appropriate legal actions we can take.
On Interaction with the Development Team and Other Company Departments
There is not much open information and other people’s experience in this area, so we have developed it based on our own experience. Once we learned how to do something, I would write a script that allows us to streamline some of our work processes. And when we wrote a number of these scripts, we decided that we needed to establish a full-fledged service with a development team. Currently, we are in the process of finalizing the interface of our service, which will enhance all of our work processes.
Apart from the development team, we also work closely with the editorial team, lawyers, and the program department, which is essentially our client. The program department provides us with information about upcoming releases that need to be protected. We immediately create a request for documents from the lawyers, and they return the completed package to us. The editors provide us with the content files, allowing us to create fingerprints on social networks. We then upload the video via private links and search for matches. If matches are found, they are blocked automatically.
How to Assess the Team’s Quality and What Metrics to Use
As we prepare to implement a new system, we are revising our approach. Our main goal is that someone who uses a search engine or a social network should not get a quick result by typing “Gold Diggers watch online”. However, we are still contemplating how to assess this in a qualitative or quantitative manner. The number of links an employee can find does not directly affect this metric. You could put in a hundred links from some obscure forum that no one uses, but the output would still be full of pirated content. Our current focus is on gauging efficiency based on the team’s ability to restrict access to pirated content. If it is challenging, then we are doing a good job. My product objective is to establish 24/7 tools that enable us to comprehensively safeguard our content.
On the Market Situation, Research, Calculations, and What Amounts Are Lost by Copyright Holders Because of Pirates
This is a good question, and it remains a challenge, as I could not find any data to show a quality result by the numbers. There have been two major studies conducted by Google and the European Commission, but they produced opposite results. Moreover, some argue that piracy can actually contribute to the popularity of a product. For instance, the creator of Steam believes that piracy is only a problem for platforms that fail to provide quality services. There are different opinions, they vary. The problem with movies and premiere products is that it is difficult to measure the extent of the damage, due to the fact that it is impossible to run two identical projects that are equally popular (the numbers on all projects are always different). This means that we can not do a study where we protect one project and not the other, and look at the result. This is the challenge of estimating this metric. There are some ideas on how to track this, but they are still under development. One method of damage assessment is to understand how much traffic pirate resources have, but the pirate resources that have such statistics will never share them, since it can lead to legal repercussions. Similarly, assessing the number of views on social media is also challenging. For example, if a post with pirated content has 100k views, it still does not mean that all 100k views are real. This means that 100k people at least saw this post, but it does not mean that they viewed the content. View % in such cases is known only to Telegram (and it is not clear if they track it). This also applies to other social networks.
Tips for Newcomers: How to Get into Anti-Piracy and Grow
There are two main career paths: you can work as a lawyer or as an IT or product specialist. Both are needed, so it is up to you to decide what you want to do more. I can not give advice to lawyers, as I mostly engage in process building, technical support, and finding solutions. There is a wide range of opportunities, but there are some key skills and traits: you need to have a basic technical background and understand how the web, sites, and the Internet work. You should know how to find the developer console and work with code pages. Your opponents, the pirates, know how to do it, and if you do not, you are at a disadvantage, and they win.
Project managers and product managers also know how to do that, because they know how to manage processes and have a good grasp of the technical side.
And the third path is open-source intelligence. It also requires erudition, education, and a good understanding of both legal and technical issues, so it is useful to be well-rounded. For example, there was a case with GTA San Andreas that has a multiplayer mode. We found out that the two pirates we were looking for had once long ago administered one of the servers of this computer game. Using their usernames and comments in the VK group of the server, we found the people behind that pirate resource. If we did not know anything about the game and multiplayer mode, we could not have figured it out. You never know when something will be useful, sometimes your accumulated knowledge can come in handy in the most unexpected ways.
