How pirated Avatar: The Last Airbender leak ties to global crime networks
When Paramount's 'Legend of Aang' leaked online this month, it may have caused more than just a headache for the studio. The film's existence on digital piracy sites may have, unwittingly, helped to fund more serious crimes including drug trafficking and human smuggling.
As our website previously reported, film and TV studios remain vulnerable to a cyber attack. And now a new report from Digital Citizens Alliance and IP House, which P6H has exclusively, is finding that online piracy is a far more serious crime than people think: Large-scale piracy networks are increasingly linked to transnational organized crime syndicates, including Italy's Camorra, one of the country's most powerful and notorious organizations.
A former piracy operator turned informant, in an interview on Italian television, warned: "Those who pay for IPTV are funding the Camorra."
The 43-page report, which you can view in full here, breaks down in great detail all the ways that online piracy groups and organized crime are intertwined, including how piracy networks increasingly act like criminal enterprises in how they obfuscate their founders' identities and use covert payment systems. Additionally, the report investigates how pre-existing organized crime syndicates have tapped into digital piracy as a revenue stream.
"We realized that these weren't kids in the basement," Tom Galvin, executive director of Digital Citizens Alliance (and a former Post staffer) tells P6H. "This is a sophisticated, multi-billion dollar piracy ecosystem that increasingly looks like organized crime." For example, piracy networks use the same clandestine payment networks used for Iranian human smuggling and embargo evasion. "It tells you the sophistication level," he said.
In another example, there was a case in Florida surrounding a popular illegal subscription streaming TV service. When IP House, a group that investigates IP theft, started looking into the person behind it, "We saw sex trafficking, grand theft auto, drugs... a rap sheet from here to Tokyo. That guy was involved in tons of criminal activities, and he was not alone," said Jan van Voorn, the group's CEO.
The Motion Picture Association under Charles Rivkin has made combating digital piracy one of its signature issues and has had a long standing partnership with The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) to combat piracy in Asia (the two sides renewed their agreement earlier this month). Galvin says he welcomes the opportunity to work with the MPA, and any other consumer-facing business that has skin in the game when it comes to this issue.
For the studios, both Galvin and van Voorn say that there's not much more they can do other than shore up their own cyber defenses, since these piracy rings operate outside the country. "They are operating oftentimes in countries that don't make a priority of enforcement," Galvin said.
"There's only so much you can prevent. I think we will see cyber leaks and attacks until the end of time. I don't think that will ever be 100% waterproof," van Voorn said. "In terms of the mitigation work that we are doing, it is very much driven through the lens of finding these operators. And the industry is doing that themselves. The companies are doing that themselves."
