Internet Piracy: “Tenacious and Persistent”

Tuesday morning Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, co-chairs of an anti-piracy caucus, joined David Price of Netnames, as well as Jonathan Zuck and Sandra Aistars in a discussion on internet piracy. David Price, Director of Piracy analysis at Netnames, presented a report of internet piracy. The study was originally released in 2011 under the company Envisional.

The new report includes bandwidth data as well as updated information from the 2011 study. The report sizes up the piracy universe and breaks it down into three ecosystems: Bittorrent, video streaming, and cyberlockers. The report also showed that North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific make up 327 million unique internet users that explicitly sought out the copyright infringing content. The 327 million users make up over a quarter (25.9%) of total internet users in those three regions.

With the United States being a major producer of content, internet piracy is a growing concern. It causes substantial harm to an already weakening economy. Piracy also causes a huge loss in sales innovation, and income.

Senator Hatch said that the Walt Disney Company spent $8 million in the state of Utah to film “The Lone Ranger;” unfortunately, piracy causes companies, like Disney, to spend less in local economies. Senator Hatch also mentioned that piracy puts personal information at risk. Taking a slightly new angle on the privacy approach, he said that with the new healthcare law about to go into effect, his concern is that con-artists will set up shop to gather and share personal information because there is a lack of a strict verification system to check the eligibility of users.

To read David Price’s full report click here.