Anti-piracy authorities say they have cracked down on illegal streaming of film and TV, but data suggest it is booming, reaching 215 billion illegal site visits last year.
That figure from Britain-based MUSO, which claims the most comprehensive data on piracy Web sites, shows an 18 percent increase between 2021 and last year, covering 480,000 films and TV shows.
“It’s as easy as it ever was to get illegal content,” MUSO CEO Andy Chatterley said.
The entertainment industry is not giving up.
It recognizes that previous efforts were counter-productive. Targeting individuals with massive fines for downloading a few movies made them look like corporate bullies, while court orders to block Web sites were often a whack-a-mole waste of time.
These days, they focus on the big fish — “people buying supercars with the millions they are making out of piracy sites,” in the words of Stan McCoy, president and managing director of the region encompassing Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for the Motion Picture Association, which represents Hollywood studios.
It is a key member of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), formed in 2017 to coordinate anti-piracy efforts globally. It does the legwork to track down big operators and alert police.
This year, ACE has helped shut down operators in Spain, Brazil, Germany, Vietnam, Egypt and Tunisia, each with millions of monthly users.
The organization claims clear results, measured in prison sentences for operators and reduced options for users.
ACE says the number of illegal subscription services has dropped from 1,443 to 143 in the US on its watch.
However, free entertainment is still easy to find.
An inexperienced Agence France-Presse reporter took just a few minutes to Google a list of illegal streaming sites and access the latest episodes of hit shows Succession and White Lotus without any sign-up or payment.
Many are undeterred by crackdowns. The r/piracy discussion board on Reddit has 1.2 million members and every conceivable justification for their hobby, from the cost of legal streaming sites to lack of access in certain countries to vague anti-capitalist diatribes.
Some are disarmingly frank: “I don’t have any excuses. I could afford to pay for it all if I wanted, but instead of giving my money to some media company’s CEO who makes a thousand times what I do, I’d rather just save the money for my own retirement,” Reddit user ScarecrowJohnny wrote.
One factor dominates at the moment: the explosion of streaming options, with content now spread across increasingly pricey subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon.com Inc, Hulu, HBO and many more.
“I was paying for one or two, but now there’s 50 of the damn things and everything in the world costs more practically every day, so I went back to piracy,” Reddit user Jaydra wrote.
However, the watchdogs are unimpressed.
“People always find an excuse for piracy. It used to be there wasn’t enough choice — now it’s too much,” McCoy said.
Ironically, as the streaming environment fragments, MUSO’s piracy data has become one of the most accurate ways for media companies to measure which films and shows are genuinely popular. “Piracy is effectively the largest VOD [video-on-demand] platform in the world,” Chatterley said. “There is no platform bias, no cost bias, no access bias. You see what people actually want to watch.”
“We have clients who see what’s popular on piracy Web sites and then go buy it for their platform,” Chatterley said.
Since eliminating piracy is unrealistic, perhaps the most important goal for the industry is ensuring it does not become normalized.
“We’ve made a hell of a lot of progress to make it less easy,” McCoy said. “If people are dedicated to breaking the law, they will do, but it should be a marginalized activity, not mainstream.”
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
Taiwan’s long-term economic competitiveness will hinge not only on national champions like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, 台積電) but also on the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, a US-based scholar has said. At a lecture in Taipei on Tuesday, Jeffrey Ding, assistant professor of political science at the George Washington University and author of "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers," argued that historical experience shows that general-purpose technologies (GPTs) — such as electricity, computers and now AI — shape long-term economic advantages through their diffusion across the broader economy. "What really matters is not who pioneers
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
TAIWAN VALUE CHAIN: Foxtron is to fully own Luxgen following the transaction and it plans to launch a new electric model, the Foxtron Bria, in Taiwan next year Yulon Motor Co (裕隆汽車) yesterday said that its board of directors approved the disposal of its electric vehicle (EV) unit, Luxgen Motor Co (納智捷汽車), to Foxtron Vehicle Technologies Co (鴻華先進) for NT$787.6 million (US$24.98 million). Foxtron, a half-half joint venture between Yulon affiliate Hua-Chuang Automobile Information Technical Center Co (華創車電) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), expects to wrap up the deal in the first quarter of next year. Foxtron would fully own Luxgen following the transaction, including five car distributing companies, outlets and all employees. The deal is subject to the approval of the Fair Trade Commission, Foxtron said. “Foxtron will be
RSS