Regular updates since 2003. Major design update Jan 2020.
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Institutions Worldwide:
(1) The Global TV and movie industry is estimated to lose 15.4 billion U.S. dollars to piracy in 2021. Approx 11.3 billion lost in USA, 4.1 billion lost outside USA.
(2) Approximately 126.7 billion viewings of TV episodes are pirated every year.
(3) TV shows are the most-popular content among pirates, followed by games and music.
(4) 24% of global internet bandwidth is used for illegal downloading and streaming of pirated content.
(5) Streaming sites get the majority of piracy-based traffic, followed by torrent indexing sites.
Throughout the past decade, the internet has made content quickly accessible and shareable worldwide.
One downside to this technology is piracy — with many people now used to sharing pirated content.
Unfortunately many people aren't even aware that streaming, sharing and downloading pirated content is illegal.
In a recent study, 7 out of 10 American citizens were unaware.
FBI agents work with German Authorities to get $29.7m in Bitcoin from one of the world's most popular pirate streaming websites.
Israel's piracy get's political. Piracy giant encourages users to support Netanyahu and the media coverage is increasing the site's traffic.
TeleSport Group are taking legal action against Yandex, claiming $40m in damages for allegedly indexing video content without a licence.
Looking at the biggest monthly video subscription services and their impact on piracy.
Can government crypto-tracking technology help to stop crypto-based piracy sites?
Approximately 375,000 jobs are lost each year due to internet piracy. This number is USA only, the amount of job losses worldwide is much higher.
We estimate that around $50 billion is lost globally each year, with $26 billion lost to the USA economy.
Although we estimate that there are approximately 2 million piracy sites (including mirror sites) online today, the most profitable of them make their money from promoting large online gambling platforms and sharing a percentage of users gambling losses. Many experts consider these gambling companies to be entirely criminal in nature, while others say they are partly legitimate and just have no problem accepting traffic from any type of website, even if it's a piracy site. As piracy sites often attract millions of daily visitors, some gambling platforms take advantage of this traffic to drive revenue.
According to numerous experts, 24% of the internet is used to download illegal content. However that number is likely to have grown significantly, because the last accurate study was conducted in 2011. Since then, both the amount of people with access to the internet and the average speed of internet have increased significantly. The large percentage of internet use may be driven by social perspective, with 70% of Americans and Spanish citizens believing that using illegitimate music or movie streaming sites is completely legal.
High speed internet has made many physical products, such as paper books, CD's and DVD's almost redundant. With most formats now accessible as purely digital files. Everything from software to images and high-definition video can be downloaded in a few minutes (depending on internet speed). This ease of access and speed of delivery make physical products seem impractical, additionally, when the products people want can be accessed quickly without paying, it becomes a difficult problem for content creators to stop. Increasing internet speed in particular, is the key contributing factor to video and software piracy, because these formats typically have larger file sizes than image and audio files. Music is most often accessible in small digital files, which allowed music piracy to spread even in the slow 'dial-up' era of the internet. In the future, internet speed will continue to increase, making even larger files quicker to download.
The majority of internet piracy is done by torrenting. Torrents allow users to share files between each others devices (peer-to-peer / P2P). Torrenting websites don't typically store infringing files on their servers, instead they simply index each users list of files which are copied from computer to computer. Torrenting has become extremely popular, with hundreds of millions of visitors regularly using torrent indexing sites to access digital files for free each week.
Cyber lockers can be described as free or paid services which allow internet users to download files from cyber locker servers. Popular cyber lockers offer access to small size files for free, but charge a monthly fee to users who want to download large files as quickly as possible.
Does digitally 'stamping' your content with a watermark stop piracy? It's a commonly used anti-piracy tactic, we look at how effective it is.
Copyright Explained Simply
Understanding The Reality Of Copyright As A Digital Creator
Looking At Copyright Online
Copyright Infringement Overview
The Facts Show That Piracy Existed From The Start Of The Internet
Examining The State Of Current Piracy
What To Expect In The Future
Common misconceptions about what copyright can protect..
Trademark is often thought of as being the same as copyright, but there are some important differences..
Patents are not the same as copyright, there are several key differences..
Unfortunately the "poor man's copyright method" is not a valid substitute for copyright registration, it is the process of sending yourself your own creation/s through the mail.
Even though copyright exists at the moment of creation, the value of registering is being able to prove ownership..
The original authorship and expression of works appearing on a website may be protected by copyright, but not the website itself..
No, copyright law does not cover domain names alone, but copyright protected works can be located on a website of your choice if you own the copyright..
Logo's may be eligible for copyright registration and potentially trademark as well. Copyright law doesn't cover slogans, in some cases they may qualify for trademark registration..
Studies reveal that 7 out of 10 people in America think piracy based activity is legal, selling pirated products may be part of this. We encourage all rights owners to take appropriate action against infringements..
During the Covid-19 pandemic, piracy did increase. It's likely that if more pandemics occur in future that it will rise as well, due to the increase in the number of people using the internet from home..
You can try to contact us if you feel that your application was denied unfairly, however there is no guarantee that we will certify you..