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Internet pirates may not have peg legs or parrots, but these modern-day thieves are just as troublesome. While the one-eyed sea pirate is hopefully a thing of the past (let's pray there's no real-life Captain Jack Sparrow), today's digital pirates continue their legacy of stealing, causing chaos in the online world.
Did you know:
The statistics are scary, but what's even scarier is that even streaming giants like Netflix has fallen into the trap. So, is there anything that can save your content? In this blog, we'll dive into the different threats piracy poses to your content and the potential solutions that can save the day.
Screen recording: Pirates often use screen recording software to capture video content directly from their screens. This method is commonly used to record streaming videos from subscription services or pay-per-view events. The process involves running the screen recorder while watching the video, effectively creating a copy of the content.
Ripping: Ripping involves extracting video content from physical media like DVDs and Blu-rays or even from digital streams. This method allows for high-quality duplicates of the original content, which can then be distributed online.
Torrenting: One of the most well-known methods, torrenting, involves downloading and uploading video files through BitTorrent clients like uTorrent. Users download small pieces of the file from multiple sources, which collectively form the complete video. This decentralized approach makes it fast and efficient.
Direct download: Direct download involves obtaining pirated video files from file-sharing websites. Users simply click on a link to download the video file directly to their device. This method is simple and doesn’t require any special software, making it accessible to many. Detection depends on the monitoring practices of the file-sharing services and the popularity of the files being shared.
Hotlinking: Hotlinking involves embedding video files hosted on one website into another, often without permission. Pirates can take advantage of this by finding URLs for hosted video content and embedding or linking to them on their own sites or forums. This allows them to share pirated content without hosting it themselves, thereby avoiding storage costs and legal risks. While the original hosting site incurs bandwidth costs, detecting and stopping hotlinking can be challenging because it requires monitoring and blocking unauthorized access to the hosted files.
DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is designed to protect digital media, from music and videos to software and beyond. DRM enforces copyright protection and ensures that creators retain control over their intellectual property.
Here’s how a DRM system can help you protect your content.
Controlled access: It can restrict media access to specific IP addresses, locations, or devices, ensuring that only authorized users can view the content.
Time-based restrictions: Users can set expiration dates or limit the number of times media can be accessed, creating a sense of urgency, and controlling distribution.
Sharing limitations: It can either restrict or completely prevent users from sharing or forwarding media, maintaining the integrity of the original distribution channels.
Geographical controls: Users can use DRM to enforce geographical restrictions, making sure that media is accessible only in regions where it is licensed for distribution.
Click here to get a better understanding about DRM.
Netflix and Prime Video use DRM to protect their content from threats like screen recording, ripping, torrenting, etc. But then how does videos from Netflix leak?
Pirates are always on the lookout for loopholes, and they find one with DRM. On iOS devices, DRM doesn't work on Chrome versions below 124.0.6367.119. To prevent content leaks, Netflix and a few other streaming platforms have limited the quality for non-DRM viewers to 720p. A low-quality, pirated recording that gets even worse during the recording process is much less appealing. This strategy helps keep the content safer.
This restriction on quality is a way to prevent piracy, but is this enough?
Loopholes will always be present if there is one protection wall. DRM is a way to protect it, but what you need more of is multiple walls of protection to truly protect your content.
Watermarking isn’t a new solution; brands have been using it for ages now. There are two types of watermarks:
A logo, text, or pattern is intentionally added to an image or video to signify ownership. Visible watermarks let the viewers know who the content belongs to. The problem with visible watermarks is that they can be easily removed or cropped with editing.
Invisible watermarks are hidden identifiers embedded within digital images. Unlike visible watermarks, these are invisible to the viewer's eye, which makes it impossible to remove the watermark. To add an invisible watermark, small changes are made to specific pixels during the transcoding process without affecting the image's appearance. This involves adjusting the least significant bits of the pixel data, ensuring the image still looks the same. These tiny changes create a unique digital fingerprint, serving as a hidden signature for the image.
Here's how invisible watermarks work:
Data encoding: Invisible watermarks use advanced algorithms to embed data like copyright information or tracking codes into digital content like images or videos without affecting their appearance.
Resistant to changes: These watermarks can withstand resizing, cropping, and compression, staying intact through different digital transformations.
Proof of authenticity: Digital signatures within invisible watermarks confirm content authenticity, detecting any unauthorized changes or tampering.
Works with various Media: From images to videos and documents, invisible watermarks protect content across different types of digital media.
Tracking and protection: Content owners can monitor where their content is shared online, helping enforce copyright and protect their content.
Fingerprinting involves attempting to recognize a user's identity upon their return to a website or across various websites. This method relies on detecting unique configurations that may vary widely between users, such as device type, browser version, screen resolution, and installed fonts. These distinctive attributes help in distinguishing one user from another, enabling websites to tailor content or track user behavior across sessions and platforms.
A DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) service can safeguard your content by ensuring compliance with copyright laws and protecting you from legal repercussions. It provides a structured process for handling takedown notices and swiftly removing pirated content.
Hotlinking occurs when a user displays an image or other media on their website by linking to its URL on your server. While this mostly happens with images, hotlinking can also affect audio files and videos. The primary issue with hotlinking is the loss of control over your content. When others hotlink your media, you cannot manage how or where it is used. This lack of control makes hotlink protection essential for maintaining the integrity and proper use of your content.
Ways you can protect your content from hotlinking.
Telegram has become a hub for pirated content, but what makes Telegram the go-to platform for pirates?
Large group capacity: Telegram allows for large group chats and channels with thousands of members, making it easy to distribute pirated content widely. The wide groups can have an anonymous admin who can control who can join the groups.
File sharing: Telegram supports large file uploads, making it convenient for sharing pirated movies, music, software, and other copyrighted materials.
Ease of access: Telegram is accessible across various devices and platforms, making it convenient for pirates to share and access content anytime, anywhere.
Contact the channel admins: If it is in a specific group or channel, contact the admins and request that they remove it. You can also try contacting the person who leaked it and asking them to take it down.
Report the leak to Telegram: Telegram offers copyright infringement reporting mechanisms. Search for "Telegram copyright infringement" to find their reporting form. Be prepared to provide details about the content and why it should not be shared.
DMCA takedown service: A DMCA takedown service helps copyright owners have infringing content like music, articles, or images removed from websites and platforms by crafting and submitting DMCA notices on their behalf, ensuring legal compliance and saving them time and effort. A few such websites are Rulta.com and dmca.com.
Once your content is online, controlling its access becomes a challenge. Safeguarding your content is important, as even a single breach can jeopardize revenue and hard-earned work. Yet, implementing various protection measures can be time-consuming and difficult. At FastPix, we understand the challenges faced by content owners. Our API security features, from DRM and hotlinking protection to advanced watermarking and quality restrictions, are designed to protect your content against unauthorized use and let you have control over your content.
Click here to learn more about FastPix API security features that can protect your video content from all possible threats.
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