Movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Exploring Illegal Streaming Cyberlockers

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 se...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2018-04
Main Authors: Ibosiola, Damilola, Steer, Benjamin, Garcia-Recuero, Alvaro, Stringhini, Gianluca, Uhlig, Steve, Tyson, Gareth
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Copyright
Directories
Ecosystems
Indexing services
Piracy
Provisioning
Websites
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2331-8422