World Cup Streaming Piracy Thrived on Social Media Platforms

According to some reports, piracy of the final stages of soccer's World Cup in Russia thrived on social media. VFT found 2,637 pirate streams of the July 10 and 11 semifinals on Facebook, YouTube and Periscope, with close to 30 million views, and 3,653 streams of the France-Croatia final, with more than 60 million views.

Social media platforms for live streaming are now the prevalent channel on which to watch pirated content of live events, including sports. Irdeto manually tracked pirate live streams of the same World Cup semifinals and finals on Facebook, YouTube, Periscope, Twitch and other pirate sites. Of the total sample of 1,055 streams, 70% of them were on social media platforms. For the whole tournament, Irdeto tracked 9,430 streams, and 79% of them were on social media platforms.

Regulations against piracy require copyright owners to send notices to websites, asking them to take down videos that are not compliant with copyright. Increasingly, content owners collaborate with web companies to deploy software that automates identification and takedown of unauthorized video.

You would think this automation works, but when millions of videos are made available every day across social media platforms, the task is arduous and, based on the World Cup case, not effective enough. And it is particularly difficult for events with global appeal, as the graph below shows for the World Cup. Therefore, it seems that for copyright owners, including sports leagues, the set of regulations and technological tools to identify and thwart pirate operations are insufficient so far.

VFT Solutions sampled geo-location of 500 pirate streams of the World Cup (in blue) and 5,000 views (in red).

Source: VFT Solutions

The problem is not just for content providers. Consumers can also suffer unintended consequences from watching pirated content. "In the case of this World Cup, social media appears to be the main vehicle for illegal streams, but this does not make viewing this content safer for consumers," says Rory O'Conner, Senior VP of Cybersecurity Services at Irdeto. "By viewing illegal streams, clicking on ads, or interacting with illegitimate content in any way, consumers could be opening themselves up to malware infection and other cybercrime threats. The providers of this illegal content are often criminals who will look to profit from viewers however they can.”

I have argued for a long time that only a concerted effort between copyright owners, tech companies and the government will lead to a satisfactory resolution. This is particularly important given the unprecedented growth of live streaming piracy, in addition to the more traditional piracy through file sharing. Together, they can more effectively attack the problem from the supply side by making it difficult for pirates to thrive and monetize pirated content, and from the demand side by educating consumers about the dangers and negative impacts of watching pirated content.

From the supply side, leading tech companies and social media platforms should play a more prominent role to develop and improve tools to clamp down on piracy of copyrighted material. For example, it appears through automated tools, soccer's global governing body FIFA inadvertently took down a cool Twitter video of a kid celebrating an England goal against Tunisia, perhaps because the audio or video of the game was in the background. Artificial intelligence should help improve these tools to focus on the identification and take down of quality pirated streams of a game, rather than amateur content.

As social media companies increasingly invest in original content, it is in their best interest to curb piracy. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are making their own investments in original content, yet piracy abounds in their respective live streaming platforms Facebook Live, Periscope, and YouTube Live. For example, Facebook announced that it is investing 1 billion dollars in original content in 2018. Imagine the irony and threat to its own business of pirate live streams of this content thriving on Facebook Live.

Yet, live streaming piracy in social media platforms is getting out of hand. And the trend continues.

Source: Forbes