On November 26, The Motion Picture Association's (MPA) Executive Vice President and Chief Content Protection Officer Larissa Knapp, published a blog post announcing the MPA Content Protection team's strategic goals to deter, detect, and dismantle online piracy operations in 2025. Ms. Knapp's blog post can be found on the website of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertaining (ACE), an online antipiracy coalition of over 50 media and entertainment companies. ACE addresses piracy through public education, research into piracy trends, criminal referrals, civil litigation, and cease-and-desist operations.
Hopefully, the efforts of MPA, ACE, and individual U.S. copyright owners to curb unlawful online copyright infringements in 2025 will be successful.
Online piracy of creative works, including movies and TV shows, undermines the rights of copyrighted property owners, inflicting large-scale damages on owners and reducing jobs and economic opportunities for those industries that help support creative enterprises. ACE's July 2023 report "2022 Movie & TV Piracy Trends Worldwide" cites analyst estimates for the U.S. that there were 14.7 billion visits to film and TV piracy sites that year, as well as 1.9 billion pirated movies, primetime TV, and video-on-demand (VOD) shows using peer-to-peer protocols, not including streaming and downloading sites. Additionally, ACE's report cited an estimate that revenue losses to the U.S. economy due to global online piracy totaled $29.2 billion in 2022.
My February 2024 Perspectives from FSF Scholars, "Congress and the Administration Should Move Against Online Copyright Piracy," identified three ways to improve protections for Americans' copyrighted works from online piracy: (1) confirmation of an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) to engage foreign nations on copyright piracy: (2) stepped-up prosecutorial efforts against streaming piracy operations; and (3) legislation by Congress to establish a "notice-and-stay-down" requirement for major online platforms as a condition for receiving immunity for infringements on their websites. My World IP Day 2024 blog post added: (4) legislation by Congress to establish a legal process for judicial site-blocking of third-party websites dedicated entirely or overwhelmingly to unlawful online copyright piracy.
The Free State Foundation is dedicated to the protection of private property rights, including intellectual property. In the year to come, FSF scholars will have more to say about legal and policy measures to combat online copyright piracy.
Posts
