Hollywood targets more online pirates

In recent years, Hollywood has become much better at hunting pirates. Last week, five men were convicted of operating Jetflicks, an illegal streaming site that federal prosecutors said offered stolen programming of TV shows and movies that was larger than the combined catalogs of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.

But thieves are also getting better, moving their operations overseas and taking advantage of the growing popularity of streaming to steal more content.

So entertainment companies, already under pressure from Wall Street to improve the economics of streaming, are stepping up their anti-piracy efforts, hiring a former FBI official to lead the campaign and renewing their push for 'federal legislation to combat online theft abroad. The companies, including Netflix, Disney, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery, are also expanding their piracy monitoring to include live sports.

On Monday, the Motion Picture Association, a trade group that represents these and other companies, said it had hired Larissa L. Knapp, a 27-year veteran of the FBI, as its lead pirate hunter. During her tenure in the office, Ms. Knapp held leadership positions in national security, counterterrorism, intelligence and cybersecurity. She got her start in the FBI as a special agent investigating computer hacking and intellectual property crimes and eventually became the bureau's fourth-highest official and highest-ranking woman.

Her official title at the Motion Picture Association will be executive vice president and head of global content protection. Ms. Knapp succeeds Jan van Voorn, a Dutch anti-piracy expert who left his post in March to lead IP House, a privately-funded startup focused on copyright enforcement .

Larissa's relationship with law enforcement will be extremely helpful to us, Charles H. Rivkin, president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association, said in an interview. We were far from the guys selling counterfeit DVDs on street corners. This is global organized crime. The people who steal our movies and TV shows are also involved in sex trafficking, money laundering, and all of society's ills.

The association's antipiracy effort is known as ACE, which stands for Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, which sounds innocuous. Founded in 2017, ACE is a coalition of more than 50 media companies from around the world. Before its creation, the Motion Picture Association carried out about a dozen anti-piracy actions per year; he now performs a dozen or more actions per week. There were 1,400 illegal streaming sites in North America in 2019, according to Mr. Rivkin. This number is now closer to 200.

ACE has had remarkable success since its launch in 2017, but the fight against piracy continues, Ms. Knapp said in an email. The idea of ​​working with an organization strong enough to take on this responsibility appeals to me greatly.

The fight against piracy abroad, particularly in Asia, remains arduous. MUSO, a piracy tracking company, said in January that video sites containing stolen content attracted 141 billion visits worldwide in 2023, a 12% increase from 2019.

The bad guys have gone to other places where it's harder for us because the rule of law is not as strong, Rivkin said. The top three English-language piracy sites are all located in Vietnam.

To that end, the Motion Picture Association has begun campaigning on Capitol Hill for a new tool: court-mandated site blocking. The studios want a law that gives them the ability, in a process overseen by a federal judge, to force Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy sites. In recent years, more than 60 countries have passed similar legislation, Mr. Rivkin said, adding, “It’s time for this to happen in America.”

Some entertainment companies view anti-piracy efforts as a way to generate growth. In countries like Spain and Mexico, for example, ACE-facilitated shutdowns of piracy sites have helped attract tens of thousands of new customers for legitimate services.

In a way, Hollywood is still suffering from the failure of the most aggressive films in 2012. Law against online piracy, or SOPA, which was also aimed at foreign sites. The Motion Picture Association was badly beaten by Google and other technology companies, which argued that the legislation would, in effect, allow the government to censor the Internet.

Since then, the proliferation of legitimate streaming services has made it easier for pirates to steal content. They can watch a movie on one of our streaming services in less than four seconds and download it three seconds later, Rivkin said.

How much resistance from tech lobbyists will the Motion Picture Association face this time? It's unclear. Since the SOPA fight, Apple and Amazon have both moved to Hollywood and Netflix has become a full member of the Motion Picture Association. Although Apple TV+ and Amazon are not official members, they are deeply involved in ACE.

A trade group in the technology sector has made its discontent known: the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple. HAS congressional hearing In December, Matthew Schruers, president of the association, said there was a long history of site-blocking injunctions leading to overreach. He continued: “It is simply not possible to develop a uniquely American, speech-protecting site blocking regime.