MPA Content-Protection Wing’s War Against Piracy: ‘We Will Find You and Shut Down Your Servers’

09.03.2022 - 19:15 / variety.com

Bob Verini At any given moment, upward of 100 crack MPA investigators are on the hunt of pirates — not unlike the king’s sailors of olden days, ready to do battle. But the MPA is chasing those who would co-opt the world’s intellectual property.That’s the reassuring message of Jan van Voorn, the MPA’s executive vice president and chief of global content protection, who claims to bound out of bed every morning, eager to take on the malefactors.“I’m out there to protect the legitimate content creators, big and small.

We’re out there to keep the marketplace clean, and most of the time we’re dealing with very bad guys. I’m happy to oppress the bad guys and let legitimate companies thrive.” Bad guys emerged instantly when the home video revolution enabled mass duplication of bootleg cassettes, and later DVDs, to be sold cheaply from black market to flea market.

Such centralized operations gave way, with the dawn of the internet, to a decentralized model in which individual file sharers would trade content with their friends — a much harder paradigm to monitor, van Voorn concedes.Today’s proliferation of illegal subscription services, which can stream thousands of hours of movies and sports on the cheap, is a return to centralization, and van Voorn says, “It’s easier to attack. There are points of failure: There’s a server somewhere that hosts these files.

So we can go after these content locations accordingly.”Can do, and have done: From a high of 1,400 illegal platforms in North America alone in 2019, the antipiracy campaigns have reduced that number to 238 in 2021, “with many other cases still in the pipeline.”IP defenders employ four tactics, which can escalate as need warrants. The politest is the familiar