The criminal practice of reproducing and sharing original content without the proper license for use has gained sophistication and dynamism with new ways of operating in an expanded dimension, impacting the economic scope and registering losses for the whole society. This threat was the subject of a discussion promoted by a Telesíntese live event, this month, that brought together representatives from the Brazilian regulatory agency, Anatel, and private institutions, as ABTA (Brazilian Pay-TV Association) and NAGRA.
Both sides agreed that joining of forces from the public and private sectors seems to be the most effective response to the fight against digital piracy. “In an environment with a diversity of resources used for the dissemination of illegal content, which ranges from receivers to capture signals from payTV operators to sites and apps, which transmit films, videos, TV shows, live sport events linear channels, among other content, cooperation is the key in combatting streaming piracy”, stated Anderson Torres, Antipiracy Manager, NAGRA Brasil.
A promising initiative that meets this joint action in Brazil is the commitment of Anatel (National Telecommunications Agency) to prevent the entry of pirated devices through the import systems. The first step foresees to integrate trained agents from the Federal Revenue the inspection of the commercialized products, identifying unreliable devices or with doubtful origins, including IPTV receivers. From the private side, studies and technologies have been developed to make easier to identifying pirates and block them - with the authorities help - administratively.
On this matter, besides ABTA contribution with monitoring URLs, another important one comes from NAGRA and it's forensic watermarking technology, which facilitates the tracing and recognition of illegally distributed content. “Even with edits, inclusion of logos or any other malicious resource used to disguise the origin of the leaked content, forensic watermarking monitoring and analysis are possible to identify those responsible for piracy”, said Torres.
Content and service piracy will continue to be a major issue for the audiovisual industry and current trends suggest this has been heightened further by the recent COVID-19 outbreak. It is therefore through cooperative action between police, state and federal revenue, intelligence agencies, public prosecutors, with the collaboration of private agents, can favor the exchange of information and help to prevent the illegal practice of copyright infringement in different spheres. Only through structured and joint work it will be possible to dismantle criminal associations and effectively combat the product of cybercrime.
Contact us to learn about NAGRA's forensic watermarking technology and get further information on how it allows to identify those responsible for illegal practice of copyright infringement and to fight against the product of cybercrime.