Cyberlocker, Torrent, UGC, Grey Market: How do you protect content?

Cyberlocker, Torrent, UGC, Grey Market: How do you protect content?

MUSO's ABC of online piracy. MUSO is the world's leading anti-piracy platform for rights holders. Every day we scan over 5m popular sources of illegal content, and over 30m pages in total to provide an efficient, direct and cost-effective content protection platform for rights holders to protect their online revenues.

Anti-piracy doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive or time consuming, but for many businesses the overload of information and sheer number of illegal distribution channels makes it very seem a combination of the three.

Successful businesses in today’s technology driven world understand their customers’ typical behavior, and this approach so often relied upon by marketing departments is no different when also defining an effective anti-piracy approach. In fact, if your marketing campaign is resilient and effective, by default, so should your anti-piracy efforts and with just a few simple steps, it still can be.

In understanding the illegal opportunities that currently exist and must be combated, an understanding of the online world and its relationship and the characteristics now often carried over from the physical world. Ask the questions: How do my customers consume my content? How do they respond to our marketing and advertising campaigns. Where do the majority of our sales come from? And from what demographics?

Cyberlockers are often, in today’s market, the starting point for most people’s experience in pirated content and this is as much due to their visibility on the search engines as it is their proliferation across the message boards, blogs and millions of other sites we scan every day. Cyberlockers can also be many things to many people – offering live low-bandwidth video streaming for users looking for instant gratification, as well as multi-gigabyte multi-file downloads for the more discerning users looking to download an entire Blu-ray.

While Cyberlockers are the most damaging piracy source in terms of converting a mainstream audience to the illegal distribution channel, they are the most exposed to legal action if not maintaining compliance to various anti-piracy legislations globally employed by MUSO, and subsequently, content can be removed in the fastest possible timeframe – often instantly after being discovered and verified by MUSO. Cyberlockers offer fast, convenient and anonymous distribution of your content and should be considered.

Second to cyberlockers, P2P Torrent files allow users to connect to other users via software to download files. The torrents are easily discovered via forums, blogs and search engines themselves but less widely adopted in the piracy distribution model due to the somewhat more technical process required to download, as well as the potential of the user being identified by anti-piracy companies like MUSO when connected to the software.

P2P websites which distribute the Torrent files also have a responsibility to acknowledge and respond anti-piracy legislation in their country, or the country in which their servers are located, but are not as responsive as cyberlocker sources. Furthermore, a number of Torrent sites like the notorious Piratebay have positioned themselves as piracy destinations and actively reject any request to remove infringing content, requiring a different strategy to remove distribution. P2P Torrent index sites offer a strong alternative to cyberlockers for fast, convenient distribution of your content, towards a more technology aware audience

User Generated Content’ websites, or UGC, popularized by Youtube, allow users to upload primarily video files for the enjoyment of others. UGC sites include major traffic destinations like the aforementioned YouTube, Hulu.com, Dailymotion.com and Vevo.com, and since their inception have blurred the line between legal content and illegally infringing and unlicensed material. UGC sites will often contain your content in long form, but broken into multiple shorter parts. Users visit UGC sites often to interact with your content, watch trailers and behind the scenes clips, or to stream new music, and discover full-length, pirated content often without the intention to consume illegally. UGC sites are fully compliant with anti-piracy takedown legislation and also offer rights holders a scheme to tag content, rather than have it removed, for which rights holders can be awarded royalties.

UGC sites are a crucial destination to adopt anti-piracy, often promoting and distributing illegal material to a different and often unintentional audience group than Cyberlocker and Torrent sources.

Grey market websites sell digital and physical copies of your product unlicensed (at best) and illegally (most likely). Grey market infringements can range from a distributor selling content on Amazon incorrectly setting his shop geographic settings not to infringe on a distributor in a different region, to entire websites slickly produced and cleverly marketed to appear legal, whereas the opposite is true and income is often fuelling other illegal activities and trades. Major grey market distribution centers include search engine listings, retail sites like Amazon and auction sites like eBay. All grey market destinations can be shut down quickly and efficiently.

MUSO understands each element of the illegal distribution model for your content requires a different approach to effectively shut down and prevent from re-emerging. Consumers will react to your advertising and marketing in different ways and can ultimately discover your content illegally at any point on the illegal distribution model. MUSO also understands that understanding, searching and enforcing the illegal distribution market for content can be a near-impossible, time consuming and expensive task, which is why our simple, intuitive browser-based dashboard provides rights-holders with a powerful end-to-end solution in removing all illegal options and empowering their online marketing with a

MUSO empowers rights-holders to enforce and shut down the entire illegal distribution market for their premium content, in the fastest and most cost-effective way possible, with just minutes of input each day.

Founded in 2008, MUSO provides a platform of cost-effective online anti-piracy solutions used every day by over 1,000 rights-holders globally, from major media corporations to niche cutting-edge independent content producers. We help protect many of the world’s leading brands and premium content from online piracy, and operate from offices in London, UK and Burbank, Los Angeles.

To find out more about MUSO’s suite of piracy solutions, please visit Products.

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