Piracy : How it works, what to do about it
I see a fair few posts complaining about piracy. If you know how it works, you can take a view.
TLDR : Platforms can’t stop people stealing your content. If they could, they would, but they can’t.
The Steal
No hackers involved.
Really, evil hackers breaking in stealing everything isn’t how it works, not with content.
(Evil hackers breaking and stealing stuff IS a thing, and it can be content, but generally, it’s a lot more mundane).
Vault Heist
People who PAY to join your site and then download all your content in bulk.
These days it’s only a risk if you run a membership site that allows downloads of all the content.
Slow Piracy
These people steal via streaming.
They stream your content and record the screen.
It’s a slow process as they have to do it in real time.
There is NOTHING that the platforms can do to stop it. This is because anything displayed on a screen, that screen is controlled by the users computer, and they can run software that records it.
For research purposes I’ve recorded a few seconds of porn from platforms, BBC iplayer streams, Amazon Prime streams and Netflix streams. If they can’t stop me, I guess no one can stop screen recording.
However, it’s a slow process – they can’t steal huge amounts fast.
If you charge per scene to access, they also have to at least pay you once.
The Share
THIS is where the fuckers are fucking annoying.
The good news is that the big tubes seem to have woken up to Mastercard etc rules and now require paperwork. So your stuff shouldn’t make it onto those sites.
DMCA them
Reputable sites will respond. (Even though this law only covers sites controlled by US people).
There are various services that can do it for you automatically, for fees which are affordable if content makes you decent money.
Mastercard/Paypal Complaint
If the sites have anything that you can pay for, see how they will take payment. If they take Credit Cards, you can be nice and point out that they are in breach of the rules, because they do not have your paperwork, or you can just make a formal compliant to MC detailing that the site is in breach of their rules.
If they are an adult site taking PayPal, report them to PayPal. We know they must have lied to PP in the first place. PP can be slow but they do drop sites once they know that they are in breach.
Hobby sites
Ones that are sharing without any commercial gain.
Writing to them should work.
If it doesn’t, then you can find the IP address and use that to find the hosting company, most of whom (but not all) will happily kill client sites that pirate stuff.