Always On:
Dutch Video Piracy Prelude to a Corporate Threat
By Gary Arlen
Contributing Skepthusiast
from the April 16, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
The Netherlands covers about one-third the area, in square miles, of the Los Angeles "consolidated metropolitan area." The country's population is about equal to the combined census tally of the metro L.A. and San Francisco regions. But when it comes to sources for unauthorized video streams, the Netherlands offers more than half the number of sources as the entire United States.
About 270,000 Dutch Internet Protocol (IP) addresses offer a movie or TV show, overwhelmingly recent productions that the server has no right to sell or, more likely, give away.
According to Vidius Inc., a Los Angeles-based digital rights management start-up that captured the Dutch figure, the comparable U.S. tally of places to get a movie or TV show is 534,668 as of mid-March. Those figures are in keeping with the Motion Picture Association of America's piracy count, provided by Viant Inc., a broadband agency, which suggests that every day more than a half-million unauthorized movie downloads are transmitted.
According to the Vidius analysis, the widespread availability of broadband service in the Netherlands has helped catapult that country into the prime piracy position. In particular, chello Broadband, extensively accessible in one of the world's most cabled countries, has made it easy for entrepreneurs and enthusiasts to capture recent pay-per-view or video-on-demand programs and store them on their home computers as well as on corporate servers. The chello network also makes access fast and convenient. Coupled with the high-tech environment of the country that is home to Philips and other northern European electronics companies, there's a ready and knowledgeable audience who can digitize and distribute the video programs, from Gladiator to episodes of The Simpsons.
Vidius also notes that at any time, up to four "customers" simultaneously are downloading any particular file.
The Dutch cottage industry in digital treats overwhelms other countries. In high-tech (but less wired) Germany, there are about 85,000 IP addresses where you can find movies and TV shows. For countries of their size, Scandinavian nations have a relative wealth of sites: 32,000 in Sweden and nearly 15,000 in Finland. By comparison, the 17,000 IP addresses in the United Kingdom and 11,000 in Japan seem modest, as do the 831 sites in Portugal that Vidius identified.
Of course, in the global network, the actual real estate on which a video server is located is merely of cursory interest. It's a reminder that the video police have a lot of territory to cover in their crackdown on unauthorized copying.
Moreover, the home collection of digital programs pales in comparison with the institutional role in this process. For example, Computer Sciences Corp. appears to be a cornucopia of digitized Star Trek episodes and movies--presumably without corporate approval. The Vidius monitoring system has tracked hundreds of titles to the company's servers, squirreled away, no doubt, by avid fans who have access to the corporate cache. Some episodes are available at dozens of CSC IP addresses.
From duPont Inc. (which had at least four copies of the new Charlie's Angels movie on its servers) to the State of Wisconsin (including its university, which claims to be spending up to $5 million per month in bandwidth costs associated with illegal video transfers) to the Department of Defense, digital copies of new movies and old TV shows are yours for the taking.
If you know where to look.
The growing number of companies and individuals connected to DS3 and T-3 lines makes the process even easier. The $10 theater ticket further spurs the appetite for a free showing. The obvious sources of recent movies--PPV screenings on digital cable tiers, DVDs of Oscar-nominated films that are purloined by Academy members--are being augmented in multiple ways. Even the low-end analog piracy by theatergoers who shoot home video from the silver screen is upwardly mobile. Unscrupulous theater managers (is there a redundancy in that term?) have been known to present "private screenings" of current films during the wee morning hours. Video copyists pay a kickback to set up their digital cameras, plug into the theater sound system and then endlessly duplicate their digital treasure trove.
All of this is a reminder that the Napster brouhaha--clumsy as it has been--is merely the threshold of the new digital copyright battle. Corporations and government agencies are about to be swept into the skirmish. Not that they condone the purloined copying and serving.
Copying foes soon will ask whether the institutions are doing enough to prevent their employees or students from tapping into this resource. Network operators who find that their customers and facilities are part of the growing underground distribution system will face more pressure from their program suppliers.
On top of that, the next wave of streaming video ventures will place even more attention on the issue. MPAA already has hired Ranger Online Inc. of Vancouver to find and tag pirated copies of movies on the 'Net. Such digital watermarking pursuit is merely a tool to get to the source of purloined copies. It's not yet clear that the producers would (or even could) pursue legal action against everyone in the chain who retransmits such programs. It is conceivable, however, that they'd go after high-profile companies who play a role in the process, no matter how unwittingly.
Anti-piracy firms such as MediaDefender, IpArchive and Vidius claim they can identify pirated files as they are being transmitted and in some cases interdict a download in mid-stream. That raises other concerns about the balance between personal privacy and copyright invasion.
The latest round in the Napster case, in which the Recording Industry Association of America claims that Napster has not acted in good faith to prevent banned titles from moving through its system, demonstrates the hurdles in this stopping the swapping.
Not to mention the trans-border enforcement barriers, as underscored by the cornucopia of titles available from Holland. And those guys may throw in a tulip bulb or chocolate treat with each download.
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