The persistence of piracy

Piracy is one of the internet’s oldest problems.

According to DataProt, more than 80% of global online piracy can be attributed to illegal streaming services. Digital video piracy is costing the US economy between $29.2 and $71 billion each year. 126.7 billion viewings worth of US-produced TV episodes are pirated every year. Piracy has played a fundamental role in the loss of our collective agency as joint contributors to the internet, and has destroyed the healthy function of the creative markets where creators maintain ownership, attribution, and fair distribution of their content throughout its lifecycle.

No industry faces this more acutely than the adult industry, whose platforms and performers have been facing this issue since the inception of the internet, and whose creators suffer the most consequences from career implications to social shame because of the stigma facing sex workers. According to our proprietary research, 80% of adult creators have had their content stolen, abused, or misused.

Even the world's largest creative or digital platforms are not immune to piracy. While sophisticated digital rights management solutions, may be a worthwhile investment for well-resourced media companies, creation far outpaces recourse on many social media platforms, making the issue of piracy exponential.

As the creator economy grows and more platforms aim to empower creatives of all types (film-makers, digital artists, writers, influencers) by implementing paywall solutions, most lack the resources to help individual creators, en masse, protect paywalled content from screenshots, downloads, screen-recordings, etc.