Report Shows Digital Piracy Spiked in 2022 in the U.S. and Worldwide

Muso's October 2022 report "Piracy Data Overview January 2022 to August 2022" indicates that Internet user visits to digital piracy websites increased 22% compared to a year earlier. That amounted to a staggering 141.7 billion visits to piracy sites for all industries – movies, TV, publishing, music sound recordings, and software. And according to Muso, "the United States accounts for 10.9% of piracy between Jan-Aug 2022" – the highest of any country – with nearly 15.5 billion visits by Internet users in the U.S. to unlicensed streaming, torrent download, web download, and stream-ripping websites. To put those piracy traffic numbers into perspective, the U.S. share of digital piracy reportedly was more than 87% higher than second-place Russia. India and China rank third and fourth among countries for visits to piracy sites.  

The report by Muso – a U.K. data research company that monitors and measures global piracy – compared piracy traffic between January and August 2022 with piracy traffic between January and August 2021. Another stunning finding by Muso is that film piracy traffic grew almost 50% during the period examined in 2022. Piracy traffic involving published content grew close to 40% during that same period. 

 

Digital piracy is wrong and harmful to copyright owners. It unfairly undermines the value of their intellectual property, seriously curbing copyright owners' opportunities to make honest gains on their creative labors. My June 2021 Perspectives from FSF Scholars, "Fighting Online Piracy Will Boost American Economy and Jobs," identified policy priorities that ought to guide Congress and the Biden Administration in combatting online piracy of Americans' copyrighted works. Some of those actions include: (1) insisting on stronger copyright provisions in foreign trade agreements and proactively seeking enforcement of those provisions when foreign countries fail to adequately protect copyrights; (2) prosecuting mass-scale piracy operators for criminal copyright violations; (3) revising the DMCA to establish a "notice-and-stay down" system that would more strongly protect copyrights from online infringements in an era of high-speed broadband and mass social media user uploads. 

 

Private initiatives as well as targeted law enforcement efforts also remain important for disrupting and dismantling the lucrative online advertising streams that fund online piracy websites. For more on that subject, see my August 2021 Perspectives, "Online Ads Supporting Copyright Piracy Need to Be Stopped." And as spotlighted in a blog post from September 19 of this year, malvertising on online piracy websites pose significant cybersecurity dangers to Internet users.