21st Century Media Pirates

The problem of illegal distribution of media content today is well known to its producers and, especially, owners of media content stores. Today I want to share my own experience in communicating with those who are behind all this - media pirates. I work in a store selling illustrations and communicating with customers, including dishonest ones, is my responsibility.

Often, media pirates are ordinary customers who just don't bother reading the rules for using the content they purchase. With such people it’s enough just to find a common language. You politely start the correspondence, report the case of sharing (upload to freehosting for free download) content and immediately get an answer.

In this case, the scenario can develop in two directions:
1) the buyer apologizes, promises to remove your content from freehosting, admits that this was a mistake;
2) the buyer wonders how this could happen, because according to him, he does not even know how to use services such as megaupload, hints that this is some kind of error and promises to continue to closely monitor the fate of the files he acquired.

The situation is more complicated if the buyer consciously shares your content. This is a real media pirate, and this is really a pressing issue for stores. You invest your time and money in developing unique content, put it on the storefront, enjoy growing sales, but after some time, you find your work in the public domain in the archive at freehosting. I think that sooner or later, all media content producers are faced with this. This is especially true for creators of hand-drawn characters, comics and unique photos for photo stocks. Finding shared work is not an easy task, and dialogue with pirates is always very difficult, because they know that they have violated the license and are not going to admit it at all. What can and should be done in such cases?

Having asked this question, together with the company's programmers, we wrote a script that, when buying a file in a store (we have a zip archive with PSD, PNG and JPG files attached to it), it unpacks the archive and puts the information into exif files of all three formats. For more advanced pirates, this is not protection, they can get rid of it by converting the file to another format or saving it again. Therefore, we added slightly more noticeable watermarks to the files. The information in exif and watermark contains only the customer ID under which it is recorded in the store database.

What we got at the exit. A pirate buys a file, the system in a few seconds unpacks the archive, puts labels and packs the archive again. The pirate goes to the freehost, downloads the file, and often without even changing the name of the purchased archive. We find this link ourselves (surf by the name of the archive on freehosts) or it is sent to us by other buyers who found the shared file on the forum or in the social network. Unpack, using special software, look at exif-files and watermarks, easily find the ID of the user who purchased the file and block his account.

In this case, the reaction is completely different. After all, it is one thing when you suspect something and you have no evidence, and another when you show the buyer a link that he, of course, recognizes. Our pirates were horrified by this turn of events. We have already been accused of violating the privacy of information about our customers (although the account ID is just a few numbers) and threatened with legal proceedings. However, after the introduction of our pirate trapping script, the sales in the store significantly increased, and the artists creating the content feel protected and are happy to post their work in the store.

Whether this approach will solve the problem of piracy globally is not yet clear, but it is obvious that medical content stores can and should track the fate of purchased images and fight media piracy together.

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