With help from dedicated hardware boxes, live streaming piracy has seen a massive user growth in recent years.
While there are hundreds of free live streaming sites and tools, there's also a huge market for paid pirate services, which charge a fraction of the cost of their legal counterparts.
One company that has kept a close eye on these developments is Irdeto. The anti-piracy outfit has assisted copyright holders and law enforcement on several occasions and has helped bring down some of the largest offenders.
However, the problem isn't going away, not even when criminal law enforcement gets involved. One of the problems is that it's relatively easy for pirate IPTV providers to operate in the open, helped by reputable payment processors such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.
This is one of the main conclusions of research published by Irdeto this week.
Source: TorrentFreak
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 05 2018, @06:20AM (1 child)
Today or in the near future, the major copyright owners are/will be major ISP-es too.
Can't ask them to incur the extra cost of policing what their customers do, so... how about blaming piracy on the banksters? After all, it is there where the money is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:20AM
I believe that's the only way they are gonna stop it.
KopyRight Krap reminds me of the Keystone Kops.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @06:45AM (9 children)
Is it illegal for Mastercard and Visa to process these payments and turn a blind eye to the activity? Looks like it's not. But they will probably cut people off to appease this pressure group.
If you want freedom, you won't find it outside of a blockchain.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday August 05 2018, @07:02AM (7 children)
Possible silly question, but how would they know?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 05 2018, @07:18AM (6 children)
Elementary.
By the use of the appropriate MIME type, as per RFC3514 [ietf.org] (page 3, the definition of the MIME type for the Web- or email-carried mischief).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:12AM (5 children)
Livestreaming by email?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:56AM (3 children)
Payments. By Web.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:09AM (2 children)
Oh, it is the payment that is evil.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:22AM
Well, it's the only part that Visa and Mastercard handle, isn't it?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:26AM
Its not so much a small payment that bothers me, rather its giving them my accounting and funds transfer credentials and agreeing to some long winded form that I don't really understand the exact legal interpretation of, that is, if I took an hour of my time to fish through the damned thing.
The easiest way around it for me is to do whatever I can to avoid sharing this kind of info on the net as much as I can, because I am finding it so hard to trust anyone. Even some big-name businesses seem to think little of fostering trust and will present their customer with reams of businesstalk and require the customer to accept responsibility to the entire wishlist of ambiguous legalese before a transaction can be consummated.
An anonymous download is a lot less risky than spilling my financial info to yet another entity that might misuse it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:04PM
Bonus points if you route the traffic over an IPoAC [wikipedia.org] interface.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:42AM
LOL. good humor before i go to bed.
Block chains are not anonymous, if anything they are the opposite. As soon as you interact with it they have the perfect nearly indestructible record of your transaction.
It's the same as some pseudonym name on a forum. Anonymous to the casual observer, because they don't know how easy it is to tie something to mr/ms canhazcheeseburger6895.
updating your offline wallet from your online one? that gives them your ip. Which is traceable to the isp, which can be solicited for lease records. Adding vpn's or tor just delays this.
Bought something with this? congratulations, they can now tie a physical address to that wallet one that leads right back to you. Doesn't matter if it isn't your home address. It's trivial to tie it to you no matter what address you put in because after all you 'want' what you bought right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:09AM
Once people know how to kindle a fire, how does one enforce a patent on it against the little guy whose gonna do it behind your back?
Isn't this a lot like enforcing "no wee-wee here" behind a bar, when they want a buck to use the toilet? Do that, and people will piss behind the building. In the bushes. Between the cars. It's human nature.
Ok, so they force the IPTV provider to shut down... Back to Torrents? If they think I am gonna pay what probably want me to pay, I can't justify that kind of expense for something like a movie or a play of a song. Already, the stuff is so plentiful we will cull it out of the stuff we keep, and call it a "garage sale".
This is one of those new memes that the MPAA has to accept, no different than the loss of our privacy and having telemarketers sharing lists on us is also something we have to accept, although we both use technical workarounds to frustrate the process.
Note the subliminal image of a hipster type in their copy? When a kid tightly holding a toy..."Mine!!! Mine!!!" is a far more accurate depiction of what's going on here.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:01AM (4 children)
When do lawmakers wake up, and pass laws that imaginary property holders have no right to hold the entire nation hostage?
Silly question. Lawmakers won't wake up unless and until the constituents wake them up. That won't be easy. We'll have to overcome inertia to get any real changes made. Money flowing from Hollyweird into politician's coffers has a lot of inertia.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:11PM (2 children)
I get paid to fix a car.
Maybe I should start lobbying my Congressman so I can expect payments as long as that guy drives his car.
Without my creativity to repair his car, he would not be driving it, eh?
Proud Member of the Repair Industry Association of America.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:25PM (1 child)
Exactly. And, I'll go one a little better. I've built homes, which are generally more durable than a car. (not always, but mostly) I've built a paper mill, sawmills, a bridge, and more. Shouldn't I get paid for each structure for as long as they are in use? Homeowners, industry, and the department of transportation should be sending me monthly or annual checks. And, oh yeah - I worked on building that prison. Every prisoner in New Boston, Texas owes me for his occupancy.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:16PM
You forgot to mention controlling who they can and cannot sell to...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:55PM
Arguably "the market" is taking care of it. We grew up in an era of 200M population of which 40M people watch a popular TV show, and that industry is dying faster than brick and mortar retail, where the pinnacle of TV popularity in almost-2020 means 300M+ population where 10M or fewer viewers. Pretty soon you continue that straight line decline and you'll hit zero TV network viewers around mid 2030s. TV's culturally pretty much irrelevant already.
So... all the networks do bankrupt probably after completing their current trend of merging into one giant monopoly. Then what? All the IP laws in the world won't save them if they have no viewers to sell to advertisers. Maybe they'll stick to fake news and propaganda as a service (The new PaaS?) Not too many other revenue options for them, if they have roughly no viewers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:35PM
Whenever the words "enabling" and "make available" come into play there is high probability of bullshit.