Hollywood has been putting a lot of effort into cracking down on piracy in recent years: Just last week, five men were convicted of running Jetflix, an illegal streaming site that federal prosecutors said offered more stolen TV shows and movies than the catalogs of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video combined.
But thieves are becoming more sophisticated, moving their operations overseas and taking advantage of the growing popularity of streaming to steal even more content.
So entertainment companies, already under pressure from Wall Street to improve the economics of streaming, are stepping up their anti-piracy efforts, hiring former FBI officials to lead them and pushing again for federal legislation to combat online theft overseas. Companies including Netflix, Disney, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery are also extending their piracy crackdowns to live sports.
On Monday, the Motion Picture Association, a trade group that represents these companies and others, announced the hiring of Larissa L. Knapp, a 27-year veteran of the FBI, to head its piracy investigations. Knapp held senior positions in national security, counterterrorism, intelligence and cybersecurity during her tenure at the bureau. She began her career with the FBI as a special agent investigating computer hacking and intellectual property crimes, eventually serving as the bureau's fourth-highest ranking officer and the highest-ranking woman to hold that position.
His official title at the cinema association will be executive vice chairman and head of global content protection. Knapp replaces Jan van Foon, a Dutch anti-piracy expert who left the company in March to run IP House, a private equity-backed start-up specializing in copyright enforcement.
“Larissa's law enforcement connections will be of great use to us,” Motion Picture Association president and CEO Charles H. Rivkin said in an interview. “We're far from just some guys selling counterfeit DVDs on a street corner. This is a global, organized crime. The people who steal our movies and TV shows are also involved in sex trafficking, money laundering and all the other ills of society.”
The association's anti-piracy arm is called ACE, an innocuous-sounding abbreviation for “Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.” Launched in 2017, ACE is a coalition of more than 50 media companies around the world. Before its launch, the association took about a dozen piracy actions per year; now, it takes more than a dozen actions per week. In 2019, there were 1,400 illegal streaming sites in North America, Rivkin said. Today, that number is closer to 200.
“ACE has seen remarkable success since its launch in 2017, but the fight against piracy continues,” Knapp said in an email. “The idea of working with an organization strong enough to tackle this problem is very appealing to me.”
Combating piracy overseas, especially in Asia, remains an uphill battle: Piracy tracking company MUSO said in January that global visits to video sites hosting stolen content will reach 141 billion in 2023, up 12% from 2019.
“The bad guys have left for other places where it's harder for us because the rule of law isn't as strong,” Rivkin said. “The top three English-language piracy sites are all in Vietnam.”
To that end, the Motion Picture Association has begun lobbying Congress for a new tool: court-ordered site blocking. Studios want legislation that would give them the power to force internet service providers to block access to overseas pirate sites in a process overseen by a federal judge. More than 60 countries have enacted similar laws in recent years, Rivkin said, adding, “It's time for the U.S. to do the same.”
Some entertainment companies see anti-piracy as a way to grow: In countries like Spain and Mexico, for example, ACE's help in taking down pirate sites has brought tens of thousands of new customers to legitimate services.
In some ways, Hollywood is still hurting from the failure of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a more aggressive bill that would have targeted foreign sites, in 2012. The Motion Picture Association suffered a major defeat at the hands of Google and other tech companies, who argued that the law effectively allowed governments to censor the Internet.
Since then, the proliferation of legal streaming services has made it easier to steal pirated content: “A pirate can steal a movie on a streaming service in under four seconds and upload it three seconds later,” Rivkin said.
It remains to be seen how much resistance the Motion Picture Association will face from tech lobbyists this time around. Since the fight over SOPA, Apple and Amazon have both made inroads in Hollywood, and Netflix has become a full member of the Motion Picture Association. Apple TV+ and Amazon are not full members, but they are heavily involved in ACE.
One tech trade group that has voiced its dissatisfaction is the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple. “There is a long history of site-blocking mandates going too far,” the association's president, Matthew Schreurs, said at a congressional hearing in December. “It's not possible to create a uniquely American, speech-protecting site-blocking regime,” he added.