Legal, Technical Frameworks to Fight Piracy Highlight Sports Anti-Piracy Summit Sessions

Legal, Technical Frameworks to Fight Piracy Highlight Sports Anti-Piracy Summit Sessions By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Thursday, February 21, 2019 - 1:26 pm

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Story Highlights

Top anti-piracy technology providers took to the stage at the 2019 Sports Anti-Piracy Summit in Mexico City and moderator Simon Hannah, partnership director, Friend MTS, began the session with the provocative observation that some of the piracy actually begins within the organization that is having streams pirated.

Legal issues surrounding the fight against piracy were the focus of a panel discussion at the 2019 Sports Anti-Piracy Summit.

I see a lot of content that originates from the broadcaster as there are video feeds of games where you can hear the presenters chatting to somebody in the production truck, he said. There needs to be a zero-trust approach to combating piracy and security is a living, active beast that requires constant monitoring form leaks.

Hanna espoused a glass-to-glass approach to security that begins at the camera acquiring the content and passes all the way through to the edge device that delivers the content to the consumer.

He breaks down piracy to three main types: the soft piracy of concurrency management whereby consumers share log-in credentials; content restreaming where pirates restream the primary source of the content by re-encoding it and uploading it to the Internet; and screen scrapping where a desktop OTT player is hacked into with free tools and then uploaded to the Internet. He demonstrated how the latter could be done in a matter of seconds and lead to illegal content being streamed to sites like Twitch, Facebook, and more.

Rodrigo Arrigoni, CEO, Ether City, says that monitoring is the biggest part of anti-piracy efforts, with take down tools tapped into data so that those tools can intelligently find the most important ports to shut down at any given moment.

With open source software a pirate can be up and running in five minutes but there is also another part of the market that is booming and that are illegal set top boxes, he said. Some markets, like Brazil, see pervasive availability of illegal set-top boxes that include pirated subscriptions to pay TV services within consumer electronics stores. Other areas of Latin America, however, do a better job of keeping those set-top boxes off the streets.

Cristobal Florenzano, NED, Executive Director, said that professional pirates are very sophisticated and even have redundant live stream operations in place so that if one stream is shut down there are five or six more in place.

Also, they are moving out of the open Web and into downloadable apps that can transmit games to smart TVs, he added. It's quite complex and we also need high-skilled operations that attack their funding models because there are people who make a living on the basis of re-streaming pirated content.

Florenzano said that there is also a need to pressure the mainstream Internet ad server providers because they are including pirated Web sites within their networks.

They are allowing and enabling the survival of these Web sites and the big corporate players are turning a blind eye to something they should collaborate on to end, he said. These apps have mainstream payment processes and can compete with a user-experience that is professional and available in app stores of smart TVs. We need to take it very seriously because they do damage to the formal and established OTT offerings.

Pirated streams on social networks like Facebook is becoming less and less of an issue as the social networks make it easier to locate and shut down illegal streams. Florenzano said that private sharing, however, is still an issue as pirates have found ways to hide the content by hiding a part of the video frame.

Javier Perea, CEO, Smart Meidia Protection, said that a comprehensive approach to combatting piracy requires the use of multiple technology tools. But it also can't be too complex because if it takes an hour to shut down a stream that is often too late to effectively protect a live sports event.

Technology is a tool that is not going to fix the problem unless you change the tools and make an affordable investment [in fighting piracy] that works for your organization, he said.

In addition, the pirates are constantly evolving and figuring out new ways to defeat the tools designed to defeat them. Within a matter of weeks, a solution that proved effective can be rendered useless.

Collaboration is very important, said Florenzano. Watermarked content, for example, is shared with different countries and broadcasters and some of them are not integrating the watermarked signals so that pirates can grab it there. That makes the fight more difficult and there needs to be better integration by the industry as a whole. A collective effort has to be done as an industry to try and solve this problem which is going.

The Legal Challenges

Ivo Gagliuffi, president of the board of directors at the National Institute for the Defense of Free Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (INDECOPI) in Peru, said that there is a new issue with piracy: digital. Raising awareness among consumers so that they don't see it as something that is normal is important.

We are not waiting for people to file a report, he said. When we see piracy, we try and act quickly. And we need to talk about piracy so that kids understand what it is.

Irely Aquique, divisional director of Intellectual Property Protection at IMPI, discussed the approach to legally fighting piracy in Mexico. The Supreme Court of Mexico has recognized the that IMPI has the right to block illegal streams.

It was great as we were concerned that they would say we have no jurisdiction, she said. We are working on some cases right now and have ev

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2019/02/21/legal-technical-frameworks-to-f...
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