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Ask HN: How (and with which tools) does the music/film industry fight piracy?

4 points by alexhektor ↗ HN
I'm wondering what tools the labels, studios, RIAA, MPAA and whoever else fights piracy uses in order to remove File Hoster links, log bittorrent protocols etc. and how successful that is. What are the metrics here? Is it worth it for them? How much do they spend on this stuff?

Or do lawyers do that for them? Then what tools do they use? I'm just generally interested in the topic from an industry perspective..

3 comments

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ISeemToBeAVerb
How successful is it? Do a torrent search for any album you want and that will answer your question. I'm not sure the labels really have a solid strategy to combat piracy. So far their threats have seemed pretty arbitrary to me. I highly doubt that their lawyers are involved with any technical system they have, assuming they have a technical system at all. Look at it from a feasibility standpoint, how could a major label possibly prosecute, let alone distinguish, all the people pirating their music? They can't. So far, I think they've settled for making examples out of people. The theory being that if guy A gets hit with a 200,000 dollar fine for downloading a song, other people will be scared enough to think twice.

I think any reasonable person can reach the conclusion that suing all the people downloading your music is an exercise in futility. What will they do? Well, that's the exciting part... who knows? Furthermore, who really cares?

Artists are moving on to better models, the public is moving on to better models. The only thing I feel I can rest assured of is that the major labels need to figure out how they can maintain relevance in a market that doesn't value them as much anymore.

alexhektor
Very good points. I especially second that it's about damn time for new business models..

Coming back to the question how they fight piracy, I know they do remove lots of links, my question is more directed to how and why they do it or don't.

Some artists/labels/studios still do the lawyer scheme in which they sue thousands of people and hope that a small percentage settles, which brings in a lot of additional revenue. And this is also where individuals get hit with out-of-space lawsuits..

But they did seem to learn from it and try hard not to make press by suing 11 year olds who just downloaded 3 songs over $27Mio anymore.., so they don't focus on the casual downloader or the streamer who doesn't even know if the site is legitimate because it looks professional, but rather on the uploaders..,

but still, I'm really interested if there's an industry out there for this, because in my mind, every 20-something could tell them how to deal with piracy better than probably most of their lawyers or advisors.

I'd love to get in a conversation with one of those guys though and hear their points of view, also the artist's point of views..

tobylane
It has been said that they pretend to be a leecher, wanting parts from everyone in the group, then they give all these IPs to lawyers. The lawyers are meant to (ab)use the courts to translate an IP into an american citizen to be sued, but the courts are throwing these cases out generally.

It's successful, and it's not. Takedown requests aren't fought, so it goes down, but two more come back up in its place. You'd think the RIAA et al would be the Lernaean Hydra but technically the people responding to the DMCAs are (not that I disagree with them).