Throughout its century-plus existence, the motion picture industry has had to fight battles on multiple fronts to protect its content from piracy. From protecting film reels from duplication by unscrupulous parties (often theater owners themselves), to the age of VCRs, DVDs, IP-based peer-to-peer networks and today’s streaming services, Hollywood has a long history of working to keep ahead of what has often been termed as a “whack-a-mole” strategy.
And as content has moved from the theater to broadcast and now to streaming, the threats are myriad and growing, with the estimated annual lost revenue to the U.S. economy due to global online content piracy at nearly $30 billion, according to Bryan Willette, vice president, content protection (Americas), Motion Picture Association (MPA).
One of the biggest misconceptions is that piracy is a victimless crime and that it’s harmless, Willette said.
“In reality, digital piracy harms the entire entertainment ecosystem, including
all the people who work hard to bring a movie or TV series to fruition,” he said. “We’re talking about set builders, makeup and wardrobe artists, caterers, cinematographers, sound mixers, production assistants—the list goes on.”
In today’s connected world, that’s not the only risk, he adds.
“Streaming or downloading pirated content puts consumers’ sensitive information at risk,” Willette added. “Recent studies have shown that accessing pirated movies or TV shows could compromise credit cards, banking information and even infect your computer with malware.
“Many consumers aren’t aware that digital piracy operations are often linked to global organized crime rings that engage in drug and human trafficking, fraud and other crimes,” he added. “We like to say that if a streaming deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Strength in Numbers
The importance of intra-industry cooperation to battle the threats posed by piracy prompted MPA to create the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) in 2017.
“MPA/ACE have nearly 50-plus members, comprising studios, broadcasters and sports organizations, and we work with them regularly, particularly with respect to our anti-piracy efforts,” Willette said. “We also have developed relationships with many intermediaries and work with these and many other partners to ensure we continue to detect, deter and dismantle piracy operations.
“Working with these partners is critical, given piracy operators are reliant on them to provide infrastructure, bandwidth and payment processing,” he added. “Additionally, a great part of our success is due to the partnerships we’ve formed with law-enforcement agencies such as the FBI, HSI, Interpol and Europol, as well as other foreign agencies.”
The MPA has used a variety of methods to combat piracy over the years, through physical enforcement, litigation and legislation, but perhaps the most significant step to address the problem in the digital age was the creation of MovieLabs in 2006.
Motion Picture Laboratories Inc. (aka MovieLabs) is a nonprofit technology research laboratory that was founded by the then-major studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox Film Corp., Universal City Studios, Walt Disney Pictures and Television and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
In essence, MovieLabs serves as a tech hub designed to research and fund the development of technologies that advance media distribution and creation, according to President and CEO Rich Berger, who noted the confluence of factors that has led to the challenges studios currently face.
“Throughout our history, our industry has faced a range of challenges, including changing consumer habits, rapidly evolving and disruptive technologies, more competition for time spent on media consumption and economic challenges,” he said. “Currently, we are seeing a combination of all these factors. The good news is that our industry continues to evolve and overcome these challenges.”
A key component of the organization’s current focus has been outlined in the “MovieLabs 2030 Vision,” which outlines its strategy in adapting to the rapidly evolving media distribution landscape.
“The MovieLabs 2030 Vision is a growing industry movement inspired by the MovieLabs Evolution of Media Creation white paper, which lays out a bold vision and roadmap for a more secure, efficient and interoperable media creation pipeline using cloud infrastructure, zero-trust security and software-defined workflows,” Berger said. “The ultimate goal is to empower storytellers to create the best stories imaginable without limits.”
Although battling piracy is among the core goals of MovieLabs, the organization is not an enforcer. Instead, it chooses to attack the problem by identifying and developing new technologies for content creation and distribution, which in turn, can result in the enhancement of copyright protection. Among its biggest current technical challenges is the inefficiency of moviemaking and distribution, according to Berger.
“One of the biggest challenges that MovieLabs and the 2030 Vision seeks to address is the current inefficiency and complexity of media creation,” Berger said. “While the industry has a number of challenges, including the general disruption that technology itself has created, the 2030 Vision can help meet today’s mandate for efficiency while maintaining the quality that audiences have come to expect from our studio members.”
Talking Together
Interoperability underpins just about every aspect of the 2030 Vision, according to Berger.
“One of the most important benefits of interoperability is the wider choice of vendors, tools, infrastructure and services it gives to creative teams,” he said. “And it has many others, including streamlining workflows to save time for higher-value creative tasks, enabling faster adoption of new, innovative technologies without breaking things, simplifying collaboration, and creating more secure and frictionless authentication and authorization experiences.
“For these reasons, it’s essential that our industry come together, as we are in the Industry forum, and make the new generation of workflows more interoperable,” he added.
To achieve this goal, MovieLabs has created a new group to promote such collaborations.
“We think the exchange of metadata that connects people, work and assets is ripe for improved interoperability, which led us to create the Ontology for Media Creation (OMC),” Berger said. “And we have an active program called “2030 Greenlight,” where we work with tool vendors to improve the interoperability of their products and to demonstrate their new capabilities, like the use of OMC, in real workflows.
“Ultimately, the 2030 Vision is about creative enablement,” Berger added. “2030 Greenlight is all about demonstrating the value for our creative partners.”
Trusted Partner Network
Another organization created in recent years to take on piracy is the Trusted Partner Network, a joint venture between MPA and the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) formed in 2018. Among its first goals was to use MPA content security best practices to assess security risks in the industry, TPN President Terri Davies said.
“At the end of the first year [2019], they had something like 300 assessments completed,” she said. “All of the studios were signed up, many of the service providers in the industry were signed up, and it was going really well.”
Then the pandemic exposed a weak point.
“The best practices and TPN were heavily focused on physical site security; they hadn’t yet moved to app and cloud—and of course, we know what happened,” Davies said. “COVID closed all of the buildings and the security assessments meant nothing.
“Everybody was very, very entrepreneurial at that time, and those who could move to the cloud did move to the cloud, and TPN didn’t keep up,” Davies added. “And the studios had no choice then but to go back to this very fragmented approach of doing their own security assessments of each of the service providers, because the real goal of TPN is to improve security preparedness in the industry but also to provide efficiency.”
In 2023, the organization was relaunched with a new membership model, application and cloud content security assessments, and the introduction of the “TPN+” platform.
The organization used the updated MPA Content Security Best Practices v5.0 to expand its scope to include software application and cloud security in addition to site and work-from-home security assessments.
“With the launch of its enhanced program, TPN is taking a crucial step toward ensuring the security of all content produced by our members,” Karyn Temple, senior executive vice president and global general counsel of the MPA, said. “Content security is a top priority of the MPA, TPN and all of our member studios, whose ability to produce the films and TV shows audiences love depends on our ability to protect and secure that content.”
Davies explained the three main roles the TPN provides to the industry.
“We have three roles in TPN—one is what we call a content owner, which might be a Hollywood studio, Sky or BBC studios,” she said. “Those are the content owners who consume the security assessments from the vendors, who we call service providers, who do the security assessment in TPN. The service providers are everything from visual effects, localization, even pre-script.”
Davies estimates that 90% of TPN’s members work on pre-release content, “so we have a lot of application providers, like Adobe, frame.io, for example, as well as the traditional service providers—editing, localization, audio and post, all the way through to distribution.”
TPN’s third role is the aforementioned risk assessment, Davies added.
“We have our own accredited assessors who do the assessments, because we can’t just have anybody do our assessments,” she said. “We consider all three of those roles and anybody—whether they paid us or not—that’s in the platform, they are our stakeholders. We send out security alerts to them, for example, when we hear something going on through ACE, or through the studios or through the industry.”
Membership in TPN is voluntary but rapidly growing, Davies said. It includes all seven MPA studios, along with new members Apple Studios, BBC Studios, Sky and Canal Plus Group.
“We’ve got over 1,500 companies signed up in the TPN+ platform right now representing 60-plus countries,” Davies said, adding that “78% of our members have less than $5 million annual gross revenue.”
All of those members have a vested interest in industry-wide content protection and with the three organizations collaborating, they are making a difference, according to Willette.
“ACE takes down numerous piracy operations each year, he said. “In fact, a few months ago we shut down the world’s largest live sports-piracy network, Streameast. The site received over 1.5 billion visits in the past 12 months, representing major financial losses for our live-tier members.
“Each time a court sentences a piracy network operator for their illicit activities, we consider that a victory,” Willette added. “It sends a powerful deterrent message that piracy is a crime and the consequences are serious. We’ve seen judges issue fines and even prison sentences for piracy operations of all sizes.”
