Movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Exploring Illegal Streaming Cyberlockers

TL;DR

This paper explores the ecosystem of illegal streaming cyberlockers for online video piracy, revealing a centralized system with targeted enforcement efforts that successfully remove most pirated content.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of streaming cyberlockers, characterizing their content, structure, and enforcement actions, highlighting their centralization and enforcement effectiveness.

Findings

The system is highly centralized with few networks and countries dominating content distribution.

Copyright enforcement mainly targets small ecosystem subsets, achieving high content removal rates.

84% of copyright notices lead to content removal, indicating effective enforcement.

Abstract

Online video piracy (OVP) is a contentious topic, with strong proponents on both sides of the argument. Recently, a number of illegal websites, called streaming cyberlockers, have begun to dominate OVP. These websites specialise in distributing pirated content, underpinned by third party indexing services offering easy-to-access directories of content. This paper performs the first exploration of this new ecosystem. It characterises the content, as well the streaming cyberlockers' individual attributes. We find a remarkably centralised system with just a few networks, countries and cyberlockers underpinning most provisioning. We also investigate the actions of copyright enforcers. We find they tend to target small subsets of the ecosystem, although they appear quite successful. 84% of copyright notices see content removed.