How to protect a movie from piracy? It’s a question that’s been asked by a multitude of executives, directors and producers, and it’s not an easy one to answer either.

It all started around 2004 when broadband high-speed internet connections gave users the power to download and share large computer files like movies. Ever since then, movie piracy has been growing.

In fact, online movie piracy has never been as rampant as last year. This is largely the result of the global pandemic. People had nothing else to do than watch movies, or they had no money to purchase one. 

Dataprot found that pirated video materials get over 230 billion views a year, that 80% of online piracy can be attributed to illegal streaming services and that the movie industry is losing a shocking $40 to $97.1 billion a year globally. 

The forecasts aren’t looking any better either since Legaljobs predicts that movie piracy will take at least another $50 billion out of the industry in 2022. This could result in more job losses and people getting laid off.

That’s why brands and businesses are desperately looking for a solution. They want to stop losing their revenue to digital pirates and keep doing what they love: to make movies. 

In order to do so, we’ve noted a couple of interesting ways to prevent your movie from getting pirated.  

Summary

• Forensic Watermarking
• Block Credential Sharing
• Video Encryption
• How to takedown movie piracy

How to protect a movie from piracy:

In this blog, we’ll give you three ways you can implement and use to prevent your movie from being pirated and shared online illegally.

Forensic Watermarking

A method to improve your defences against digital pirates is to put forensic watermarks on your videos. These watermarks can be added to your movie at any point during production and are invisible. 

Forensic watermarking really comes into use when your movie does get leaked. Because of the watermark, advanced monitoring and search engines will be able to trace copyright infringing copies.

You’ll not only learn where your movies are being shared, you’ll also learn where the movies have been leaked first. Some watermarking software providers can even apply forensic watermarks on movie projectors.

Does forensic watermarking actually prevent movie piracy? It does not; however, it does give you a solid way to monitor for leaks, which in turn makes it easier to take it down.

Block Credential Sharing

Another method to prevent movie piracy is to block credential sharing on your platform or service. What is credential sharing?

Credential sharing is when users of a paid platform are sharing their login details (their credentials) with others, so they can share a single account with multiple people. 

Take for example Netflix. This streaming giant is famous for its users sharing their credentials with family, friends and even colleagues. However, it is not just families that share credentials, digital pirates do so as well.

So how can you prevent credential sharing on your platform? One solution would be to block concurrent logins so that only one user can access an account at a time. 

Another solution is that of letting users sign in with their social accounts such as Facebook or Google. This is also called Single Sing-On or SSO for short. Users who make use of this feature will be much less likely to share their login credentials with other people since it’s also the credentials they use for their social accounts.

So there’s two ways you can block credential sharing to prevent movie piracy.

Video Encryption

The final solution to prevent movie piracy we’re going to write about is that of video encryption, and how you can use it to prevent digital pirates from illegally sharing your movie.

Video encryption is the practice of making your videos invisible to people who should not have access to them. The most effective way of using video encryption is through DRM (Digital Rights Management) Encryption Technology.

The reason DRM Encryption is so much better than regular encryption is that it hides the encryption key. This means that digital pirates will have no option to download your videos. Therefore, they won’t be able to share it.

The most used DRM providers are created by tech giants Apple and Google. Apple offers their FairPlay DRM service, whilst Google has their Widevine DRM service. Both come with guides so you know exactly what to do.

How to takedown movie piracy

We’ve given you three solutions to prevent movie piracy; however, no solution will completely protect your content from being pirated. There will always be technical innovations amongst hackers which makes them able to crack your defenses. 

In this case, the best solution is to start working on an effective anti-piracy strategy. You need to get leaked content down as soon as possible. This will help your brand or business to prevent big losses in revenue.

Luckily, we offer brand protection services that can help your production or distribution company in taking down pirated copies of your movie. Onsist has been taking down movie piracy for over 10 years now.

We make use of sophisticated monitoring engines that will crawl a database of sites, and we employ trained anti-piracy experts who’ll manually monitor and takedown copyright infringements on social media, search engines, video sites, cyberlockers and more.  

If you’re experiencing movie piracy, we’re here to help you take it down and help you to stop losing your revenue to pirates.