Big Tech and the Fight Against Piracy (1)
It may seem strange to think that Big Tech companies such as Google, the Meta group platforms (Facebook and X – formerly Twitter), Amazon, Apple and Microsoft could profit from piracy or other illegal activities. And indeed, they generally do not profit from it directly. In fact, most of these companies even say they have extremely strict policies against piracy and the illegal exploitation of their products or services. They pay dedicated IT security teams to protect their platforms and their users’ data, and all of them have published policies that seem very clear about their opposition to piracy.
So why did we choose this theme for our November articles? As is often the case in the world of piracy, things are actually much less black and white than they seem. Indeed, two major issues arise for these companies: freedom of expression, and revenue.
How some aspects of piracy benefit Big Tech companies
Financially, these companies can indirectly benefit from certain activities linked to piracy or cybercrime:
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- Advertising: pirate sites or illegal platforms can display ads that generate revenue for these companies.
- Cloud computing services: as we saw in our October theme of the month, these platforms are often the home of illegal activities; and Big Tech companies often offer cloud services. Despite strict policies against the use of their services for illegal purposes, practice shows that this is not always the case.
- Defending the free internet: it can sometimes be difficult to remove a large amount of content from the web without disproportionately hindering freedom of expression. Companies such as X or Facebook therefore often say they do not want to monitor certain content too closely, because the line between piracy and freedom of expression can sometimes be hard to draw; for this reason, some content stays online for a long time despite requests from rights holders.
At PDN we work daily with these Big Tech players; we have therefore compared our experience with the measures taken by the companies to determine which companies are the “good performers” and which should improve their practices toward rights holders.
The good performers in the fight against piracy
Google is the obvious starting point for the average user looking for a link to just about any content; pirated and illegal content is no exception. Google also owns the Chrome browser, as well as the YouTube video platform.
To strengthen its cooperation with rights holders and their representatives, the company created the Trusted Copyright Removal Program, of which we at PDN are a part. This program sets up partnerships with about a hundred trusted companies specialized in the fight against piracy, which makes it possible to improve the speed and effectiveness of the removal of links that infringe copyright.
In the fall of 2023 Google stated that it had processed more than seven billion copyright-related removal requests. Our experience at PDN shows us that this is indeed the case; most of the links we report are removed without any difficulty.
In addition, Google uses sophisticated algorithms to detect and filter search results that point to illegal websites or content. These algorithms are continually improved to minimize the visibility of these results.
Google also supports pre-emptive removals, which means it blocks reported URLs before they are indexed by the search engine. This allows rights holders to report content even before Google takes it into account, and therefore before it is available in the search engine. Links are thus sometimes removed before a single internet user has even seen them. Google states that nearly 40% of the removals carried out in 2022 fell into this category.
This type of link particularly concerns IPTV services: during the most popular live events, such as the Super Bowl, UFC events or FIFA World Cup matches, pirates often create websites in advance to announce their upcoming unauthorized broadcasts. Copyright holders can now take them offline before the broadcast begins.
Google states that after links leading to illegal content are removed, even when the content itself remains online, traffic to the site concerned drops by 89%. Removing links from the search engine is therefore a very effective policy even when an illegal site refuses to respond to the rights holder’s requests.
Google has said it is committed to investing in new tools and processes to fight the ever-evolving problem of piracy. Recently, Google appears to have gone a step further by using takedown notices to “moderate” collections of links saved privately by users, which raises a problem in terms of respect for users’ privacy. Google also has the difficult responsibility of trying to balance the fight against this illegal content with respect for freedom of expression and access to information.
However, overall, the company is one of the Big Tech companies that cooperate best with rights holders.
Plex
Although the company is far smaller than Google, the efforts of Plex should also be noted. Plex is a media management software that lets users organize and stream their audio, video and other media files on different devices. Plex is therefore originally a perfectly legitimate tool, but it is also very widely known to pirates; it is used to share protected media, or to host private servers providing access to illegal content, and even to create IPTV channels.
In September, however, Plex sent emails to many internet users whose IP addresses indicated that they were using Plex servers associated with illegal content, to inform them that access to these servers would soon be blocked. The reason? A violation of their terms of service. Although piracy was not directly mentioned, the targeted servers all appeared to fall into this category.
In our next article we will see which companies have a more passive, even ambiguous attitude, notably those belonging to the Meta platform; in the meantime, if you have a film, a series, software or an ebook to protect, do not hesitate to call on our services by contacting one of our account managers; PDN has been a pioneer in cybersecurity and anti-piracy for more than ten years, and we certainly have a solution to help you. Happy reading and see you soon!
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