Piracy scourge Part 4: Digital signature to blockchain – Solutions are many

Adgully’s four-part indepth series on Film Piracy puts the spotlight on this pertinent issue. Part 1 of the series dwelled on how and where piracy takes place, piracy in the digital era, addressing the deep-rooted cultural issues and more.

Part 2 of this series took a look at the legal provisions available to tackle piracy and whether they have been adequate to curb this menace. Also, what are the alternate steps that producers are taking to crack down on piracy.

Part 3 of this series identified the various challenges faced in successfully tackling piracy and industry experts explain why it might not be possible to end piracy once and for all in the short term at least. This part will also look at VPN and app regulation.

Also read:

Mapping the piracy scourge Part 1: From theatres to Telegram

Mapping the piracy scourge Part 2: Stringent laws alone cannot end piracy

Piracy scourge Part 3: Regulating VPN and file-sharing apps - A tricky road

Now that we have covered various aspects, ranging from societal attitudes to legal challenges, that fuel piracy, it’s time to explore the available technical solutions to stem piracy. Experts say the deployment of digital signatures, machine learning and AI technologies, undercover investigations and cyber security, blockchain, anti-piracy technologies, etc. can go a long way in stemming the tide to a great extent.

Digital signature

Diving deep into the intelligent ways in which we can stem piracy, Block X Technologies’ Mugil Chandran, an anti-piracy expert, said that there were several intelligent ways of doing it.

For example, said Chandran, any original content should register itself under certain rules, like scripts are registered. “You create a digital signature of film. We at our level are able to do it. For example, if a film is published on YouTube or FB it immediately triggers an update to us. This film has been published, and if you want to publish or take it down. In fact, YouTube gives an even better option. If you don’t want to take it down you can monetise it. You are putting down my content so give me the profit. What they earn should come to me,” he explained.

All copyrighted materials should have a directory where they register themselves, he said, adding, “And that should become like a digital signature where it appears anywhere for any content. Any app should have the technological backup to digitally vet the content.”

According to Chandran, “It can have huge potential. In fact, as we speak, enough companies and start-ups have created more compact versions of verifying digital content/ digital signature. Make it mandatory. Like you take a driving license, if you want to create a file-sharing site, you have to have embedded this into your platform. This is where the government comes in. This is not a profitable venture; it can make a profit, but essentially, you are securing the rights of the people.”

Websites can be banned, but apps cannot. Apps have been here for almost ten years. We still don’t have a regulatory framework for it. It is strange. Chandran felt that the government lacked the clarity to come up with something in this regard.

Music as a model

Music has digital signatures. So why can’t we mirror that for films?, asked Chandran. Today, the music industry has become profitable; they have turned the tide. Premium music streaming platforms don’t allow piracy.

He asserted that sharing becomes impossible once digital signature becomes mandatory across platforms. “Technology already exists for digital signature. For any data-sharing application digital signature should be mandatory,” he added.

Chandran is someone who believes in the idea of blockchain as a technology, whereby every person who uses the content once will be recorded. “The idea is having blockchain as a technology that can play a major role in fighting piracy where every person, when sharing content, his identity is attached to that copy. That is when you can punish the offenders, for there is sufficient proof to find out the person who has consumed that content,” he added.

The film itself is a signature. YouTube and FB have digital signatures now. YouTube is stronger in this aspect and so it is easy to pull down a movie that is not copyrighted. “YouTube cares because it is losing money because of piracy. If the government is serious about it, if the intention is there, do it. It is a government job. If you upload any content, you need to go through the digital signature check. It is like KYC,” Chandran noted.

However, digital signature won’t work in website-based piracy. The only solution available is to regulate VPN. VPN regulation is the second important step after digital signature that the government has to do, he said. If VPN has been envisaged as a privacy engine, do only that. Don’t give so much bandwidth, which is the danger.

Google searches

Those who want to watch decent content should not be fed pirated ones, that’s what this anti-piracy agent has to say.

When people search for pirated content in Google, it should not appear in the first ten pages. Chandran cited the example of child porn being banned from Google searches.

“See, how effectively they have banned it. That’s also because even porn sites themselves have regulated child porn which is not legal in any country. They don’t publish it, because they can be prosecuted for it. Even within porn also there is something that is legitimate,” he said, adding that “we should have a similar mechanism in place to eradicate piracy from the cyber world.”

Streaming piracy

The arrival of OTT platforms has made streaming piracy so widespread. How can we tackle piracy from a technological point of view?

According to Deepak Bhatia, General Manager & Head of Sales, India, Synamedia, streaming pirates are continually upping their game and finding new ways to steal video content so, in order to keep one step ahead, content owners and service providers need a holistic, 360-degree approach which blends pre-breach, protective technologies with proactive detection and disruption.

The first step, according to Bhatia, is to properly protect the content.

“As any criminal hacker will tell you, DRM (Digital Rights Management) and concurrency limits are simply not sufficient because pirates can steal content directly from the Content Delivery Network by getting the DRM license and redirecting pirate clients to the legitimate service. By adopting protective technologies that ensure only legitimate subscribers and applications are granted authorised access and receive content, streaming providers can address the inherent weaknesses that make it easy for pirates to not only steal content, but also the entire OTT services,” he explained.

Proactive technologies including advanced monitoring, detection and disruption services such as edge, forensic and head-end watermarking and automated take-down solutions also play a critical role protecting premium content, he added. “For example, by embedding an imperceptible watermark in the video stream - unique for each OTT or broadcast subscriber – it is possible to track and identify leaked content, use the watermark system to determine the source of the leak, and take action to remove the leakage as well as disrupt the pirate services offering the stolen content,” Bhatia further said.

Another piece of the puzzle, according to Bhatia, is addressing credentials sharing and fraud. “With advanced machine learning and AI technologies, we can get to grips with the different kinds of credentials sharing – from family and casual sharing to industrial scale fraud and rampant credential abuses – and use a mixture of deterrents and incentives to tempt viewers back to legitimate services,” he said.

Industry stakeholders say that the lack of effective regulation and strict policing are the main villains.

“We’re all in this together because fighting streaming piracy requires collaboration and solutions to demotivate pirates at every point along the video distribution chain. Everyone, from content network and cloud service providers, ISPs, payment providers, chip manufacturers, and anti-piracy solution providers, to rights owners, streaming providers and legislators, needs to cooperate to combat and outwit the pirates,” said Bhatia.

While the financial rewards on offer and the ease of set-up – combined with the relatively low risk of arrest or meaningful punishment – means the problem of streaming piracy will not go away, the industry is making some progress putting steps in place to minimise and contain it, noted Bhatia.

He further said, “For example, legal teams have had success taking down pirate streams on platforms such as Telegram and YouTube, and new techniques such as dynamic IP blocking are also having an impact. Rights holders can do their bit by requiring video service providers to put in place better streaming security – for example mandating watermarking in their licensee contracts.”

Tackling piracy requires a painstaking, forensic, intelligence-led approach supported by a legal and regulatory framework with the muscle power to deter, detect and disrupt pirates, pointed out Bhatia.

“And I can’t emphasise enough the importance of Intelligence. Embracing, developing and applying anti-piracy technologies and methodologies is critical, but to mitigate – and even prevent – piracy, content owners need to get inside the criminal mindset and be able to answer such questions as: How do pirates steal the content? How do they repackage and sell it? How is content transported over the networks? Where are the streaming servers hosted? Where are the authentication servers hosted? How should I differentiate my content and disrupt it in real-time?” he explained.

The bottom line, according to Bhatia, is that we need to constantly monitor and map the evolving piracy supply chain. “Fortunately, there are companies such as Synamedia doing exactly that – our unrivalled intelligence model leverages AI technologies alongside human intelligence, including undercover investigators and cyber security, psychology, criminology, and sociology experts, to watch every move the pirates make in order to orchestrate anti-piracy activities and legal and technical takedowns,” he concluded.

Anti-piracy agent Mugil Chandran is optimistic about the future. He said, “There is hope. People have changed; their ethics have changed. That will happen to films also. OTT platforms will get consolidated. Big players will own all OTT platforms. That’s a different issue, though. If people can change, nothing like it.”