Pirates in the Outfield

Welcome to the eighth volume of the State of the Internet / Security report, lovingly called the SOTI by those of us who work on it. In this first report of the year, we are going to focus on the media industry. However, unlike our other media-centric reports, this edition will focus on a topic we’ve only briefly covered in the past: piracy.

Piracy is a complex topic to cover, because there are so many elements involved. Considerations include economic factors (both from the criminal’s viewpoint and the legitimate business world), technological factors, and the scale of piracy itself.

Over the years, Akamai has studied piracy from a number of viewpoints, and assisted our customers in tackling this issue. Along the way, we’ve learned a few key lessons. The largest lesson? Piracy is no longer just a cost of doing business. It’s a massive and growing business issue.

Today, dealing with piracy is a security concern — one that business leaders are taking very seriously within their respective organizations. On the flip side, piracy is a moneymaker for criminals who pirate live events, streaming media, software, publications, and other digital services.

Akamai has a great deal of visibility into the piracy landscape. This is critical to our media partners, so we worked with them to develop something to help tackle that problem. This is where our Managed Content Protection (MCP) tools come from.

Everything related to MCP originated from a customer request. Years ago, a customer reached out after a rights owner for a sporting event told them they were failing to protect the streaming content. The customer asked Akamai for assistance, and thus the toolset we now know as MCP was born. There’s more to that story, of course, but that is essentially where things started.