Media pirates of the XXI century

The problem of illegal distribution of media content today is well known to its manufacturers and, especially, to owners of media content stores. Today I want to share my own experience of communicating with those behind all this, media pirates. I work in the store selling illustrations and communicating with customers, including unscrupulous, is my responsibility.

Often media pirates are ordinary customers who simply don’t bother to read the rules for using the content they purchase. With such people, it is enough just to find a common language. You politely start a correspondence, report a case of sharing (uploading to freehosting for free download) of the content and immediately receive the answer.

In this case, the scenario can develop in two directions:
1) the buyer apologizes, promises to remove your content from freehosting, it is recognized that this was a mistake;
2) the buyer wonders how this could happen, because according to him, he doesn’t even know how to use services like megaupload, hints that this is some kind of mistake and promises to continue to closely monitor the fate of the files he purchased.
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The situation is more complicated if the buyer deliberately shares your content. This is a real media pirate, and this is a real problem for stores. You invest your time and money in the development of unique content, put it on the storefront, enjoy growing sales, but after a while, you discover your work in free access in the freehosting archive. I think that sooner or later all media content producers will face this. This is especially true for the creators of cartoon characters, comics and unique photos for photo stocks. The search for shared works is not an easy task, and dialogue with pirates is always very difficult, because they know that they have violated the license and are not going to admit it. What can and should be done in such cases?

Asking this question, we, together with the programmers of the company, wrote a script that, when buying a file in the store (we have this zip-archive with PSD, PNG and JPG files embedded in it), unpacks the archive and writes the information into the exif-files of all three formats. For more advanced pirates, this is not protection; they can get rid of it by converting the file to another format or saving it again. Therefore, we have added a little more noticeable watermark to the files. The information in exif and on the watermark contains only the buyer's ID, under which it is recorded in the store database.

What we got at the exit. Pirate buys a file, the system unpacks the archive in seconds, puts labels and packs the archive again. The pirate goes to frigost, downloads the file, and often without even changing the name of the purchased archive. We find this link ourselves (surf by archive name on frikostah) or it is sent to us by other buyers who found the shared file on the forum or in the social network. We unpack, with the help of special software, scan exif-files and watermarkas, easily find out the ID of the user who purchased the file and block his account.

In this case, the reaction is completely different. Indeed, it is one thing when you suspect something and you have no evidence, and another when you show the buyer a link, which he, of course, finds out. Our pirates from such a turn of events were horrified. We have already been accused of violating the privacy of information about our clients (although the account ID is just a few numbers) and to threaten with legal proceedings. However, after the introduction of our pirate-catching script, sales in the store have noticeably increased, and content creators feel protected and are happy to lay out their works in the store.

Whether such an approach will solve the problem of piracy globally is not yet clear, but it is obvious that medical content stores can and should track the fate of the purchased images and fight media piracy all together.