Miri Naor Elias, Intelligence and Security Senior Legal Advisor at Synamedia, believes that legislation and enforcing anti-piracy regulations would lead to a significant reduction of streaming piracy incidents and risks. However, staying ahead of piracy requires collaboration across the video distribution chain.

"Detecting, disrupting and deterring piracy requires the application of both protection approaches. For example, use OTT protection, encryption, forensic watermarking, and other technologies to ensure that only legitimate subscribers are granted authorized access to content. On the other hand, we need collaboration between content owners, legislators, and law enforcement agencies to gather the evidence needed to orchestrate technical and legal takedowns,” she explains.

In fact, Synamedia is already working with Interpol and local law enforcement agencies in the EU, UK, Brazil, and Southeast Asia to develop training materials and evidence collection guidelines to support law enforcement activities.

Content owners can fight streaming pirates by issuing shutdown orders and applying for court injunctions. Along with advances in blocking illegal streams on social media platforms, new techniques like dynamic IP blocking are starting to play their part, says the expert.

Unfortunately, there is no way to combat the threat of piracy in real time and stop the proliferation of stolen digital content as soon as it is discovered without enlisting the help of an external law enforcement agency. Therefore, Miri Naor Elias proposes updating the legislation to deal with persistent and repeated real-time breaches by pirates. In principle, rights holders should be able to take action against streaming pirates who illegally distribute unlicensed content.

The technology industry is already able to do this by integrating existing solutions and capabilities that detect and disrupt stolen content without violating pirate property or privacy. With technology evolving faster than legislation, the law must be future proof to counter the techniques used by pirates.

"It's time for lawmakers to buckle up, start the engines of self-defense legislation and force the pirates off the streets and into the ditch," says Miri Naor Elias.

Unfortunately, streaming piracy is still unstoppable: the financial benefits and low risk of criminal penalties mean that video streaming pirates are constantly looking for more ways to monetize their illicit content distribution.

By MediaBUZZ