Pallycon Adds a Powerful Anti-Piracy Service to Trace Illegal Content Leak Sources on OTT Platforms

The anti-piracy service tracks send red alerts and later eliminates illicit content from the pirated site.

Mumbai, India Sept 8, 2021 : PallyCon, a global leader in Multi DRM and content protection service provider, announced the launch of a powerful Anti-piracy service for the OTT platforms. The Anti-Piracy service tracks and mines illegal content leakage and sends a red alert to the source of the illicit content generator.

The Anti-piracy service supported by forensic watermarking integration globally monitors content leakage. It issues a DMCA Takedown Notice to the pirated website for eliminating unlawful content from the site.

Pallycon’s forensic watermarking integrated system intelligently crawls and detects hundreds of illicit pirated links over the internet. It takes down the same while providing customers with the choice to detect the source of piracy

Features of powerful Anti-piracy service -

• 24×7 Fully Automated service for monitoring
• Global Coverage (for crawling, Detection & Takedown)
• Automated and manual takedown service
• Pre-integrated with PallyCon Forensic Watermarking
• Unique identification of piracy source
• Suitable for VOD content

Expressing his views on the launch, Mr James Ahn, Founder & CEO of INKA ENTWORKS, said that producing premium content requires effort, time, and money. Illegal content copy leads to massive losses to producers and diminishes the charm of new movie releases or any creative content produced.

Pallycon can now safeguard and enable content production houses and content studios to fearlessly produce and distribute content safely by adding an anti-piracy service to the digital arsenal.

The Anti-piracy service is a premium addition to the suite of PallyCon content protection, warehousing and forensic watermarking technologies designed to secure and guard apps and developers against various breaches and content piracy.

Details - https://pallycon.com/anti-piracy/

About PallyCon

PallyCon is a premium content protection service by INKA ENTWORKS trusted by 200+ customers globally. With a 360-degree, cloud-based end-to-end content security for OTT platforms, such as Multi DRM, Forensic Watermarking, Visible Watermarking, Distributor Watermarking, Anti-Piracy services, App Security with Quick and Simple integration, Inka Entworks is a ONE-IN-ALL solution for OTT owners.

Microsoft, Alibaba Group and Carnegie Mellon University Working on Ethereum Blockchain-based Anti-Piracy Solution

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

For effective piracy campaigns bringing full transparency is needed and for the same software giant Microsoft and its collaborators, including China's Alibaba Group and and US-based Carnegie Mellon University, believe that incentivizing people is necessary.

A research paper, released by the Microsoft Research Lab, introduces Argus, a fully transparent incentive system for anti-piracy campaigns that involves the public Ethereum blockchain network. The groundwork of Argus is to formulate the objectives for fully transparent incentive mechanisms, which securely and comprehensively consolidate the different interests of all roles in any Anti-Piracy campaign.

According to the paper, anti-piracy is fundamentally a procedure that relies on collecting data from the open anonymous population.. The paper discusses on how to incentivize credible reporting --- a question at the center of the problem. "Industrial alliances and companies are running anti-piracy incentive campaigns, but their effectiveness is publicly questioned due to the lack of transparency.", says the paper. 

The full transparency of a campaign is necessary to truly incentivize people. It means that every role, e.g., content owner, licensee of the content, or every person in the open population, can understand the mechanism and be assured about its execution without trusting any single role.

Argus' system will protect the identity of the informers but allow the firm to backtrack the source of the pirated content. The anti-piracy system’s goal is to incentivize people in the open population to report the pirated copies to the system. The paper refer to these people as the informers.

In Argus, the incentive model ensures that the total reward of the informer and all his Sybils is less
than the reward he would get without forging the Sybils. In other words, the Argus model disincentivizes Sybil attacks, so the informers’ interest is aligned with the owner’s. In addition, the Argus system model is superior to previous models because of several other properties for better incentives.

The system effectively optimize several cryptographic operations so that the cost for a piracy reporting is reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, which would otherwise correspond to thousands of transactions. With the security and practicality of Argus, Microsoft research team hopes real-world anti-piracy campaigns will be truly effective by shifting to a fully transparent incentive mechanism.

In the research paper, Microsoft and its collaborators present the design, implementation and evaluation of the Argus system. 

The paper claims that Argus is the first public anti-piracy system which does three things ---

1. Does not hinge on any “trusted” role; 
2. Treats every participant fairly (in particular, it is resilient to greed and abuse, and resolves conclusively every foreseeable conflict); and 
3. Efficient and economically practical to run on a public blockchain (e.g. it achieves an impressive off-chain throughput of 82.6 data-trades per second per machine, and incurs only a negligible on-chain cost equivalent to sending 14 ETH-transfer transactions per report on the public Ethereum blockchain.

Reliance Jio's Cheap Data Fuels Digital Piracy in India

Global piracy rose by 1.6 percent over the course of 2017, identifying 300.2 billion visits to piracy websites across music, TV and film, publishing, and software, said a report by MUSO, the global authority on digital piracy. The USA topped the list as the country making the most visits to piracy sites (27.9 billion), followed by Russian Federation (20.6 billion) and India (17 billion).

In India, overall visits to piracy websites in the country rose from 8.8 billion in 2016 to about 17 billion last year. Indians now visit websites offering pirated content nearly twice as much. This can also interpreted that every second, 285 Indians visit websites offering pirated music.

Nearly 75 per cent of the traffic came from mobile devices—higher than the global average of 60 percent.



The hope resulted from cheaper and faster data driven by the nation's richest man Mukesh Ambani. His Reliance Jio, which is India's first startup to turn profitable in shortest time since the launch, has unleashed a tariff war in the world's second-largest telecom market where a third of 1.3-billion Indians now own smartphones. Notably, Reliance Jio started its free services in September 2016 and then started offering cheaper data plans since April 2017. This resulted rivals to match prices to avoid losing users to the Jio's upstart. That gave subscribers access to faster data in the country. Reliance Jio is now India’s fourth largest operator with 15 percent of the total 1.15 billion wireless subscribers. Beside, Reliance Jio is also said to be working secretly with tech giant Google to develop an affordable smartphone that will work exclusively with Reliance-owned 4G network in India.

India, which is the world’s second most populous nation continues to lead the music piracy chart for the second straight year to became world's music piracy capital. Visits to websites offering unlicensed access to music more than doubled in 2017 over the previous year. Indians visited websites providing unlicensed music 9 billion times in 2017, according data shared by analytics firm MUSO to BloombergQuint.

Nevertheless, number of people listening to songs legally online is growing with each passing year thanks to a dozen of homegrown and global platforms like Gaana, Saavn, Hungama, Airtel Wynk, Apple Music, Google Music and Amazon Prime Music which let users access vast catalogues of songs online at cheap prices. Most of these platforms offer free music, and charge as little as Rs 29, or less than 50 cents, a month for ad-free access.

The number of people listening to songs legally online, according to an Ernst & Young report, is expected to jump threefold to 273 million by 2020.

Streaming apps helped the Rs 1,280-crore ($190 million) music industry struggling to tackle online piracy. In India, the organised music app market has three main players -- Bharti Airtel’s Wynk, Times Internet Gaana and Saavn. reliance Jio thus acquired Saavn last month to create a $1-billion music entity which now directly compete with its telecom operation competitor Bharti Airtel's Wynk.

Streaming websites -- other than above -- are the most popular outlet for accessing pirated content, although torrent-based film piracy slightly increased towards the end of the year. Surprisingly, torrent-based film piracy also increased globally towards the end of 2017. This could be as a result of users becoming frustrated with their regular web-streaming sites being blocked or shutdown, and therefore choosing to return to trusted and more traditional methods of piracy. Piracy by torrenting in film was more frequent than it was in TV in 2017, but still only made up around 20 percent of all film piracy.

Related Reading - Pirate Bay Founder Builds ‘Kopimashin’, A Piracy Tool Using Raspberry Pi

Going forward with piracy in India, according to the reports from the MPDA (Motion Picture Distributor’s Association), India has one of the highest film piracy rates per capita of any country in the world. According to a 2008 report by Ernst & Young accountants commissioned by the US India Business Council, pirated films led to the Indian film industry losing $959,000 and over 500,000 jobs that year.

In 2014, a number of website which include file storage sites, torrent file aggregators and Google’s URL shortener Goo.gl and even Google docs have been blocked in India following a complaint filed by Sony’s Multi Screen Media, which has the broadcasting rights for the FIFA World cup in which it alleged online piracy.

[The above news was first reported in Bloomberg Quint.]

Reliance Jio's Cheap Data Fuels Digital Piracy in India

Global piracy rose by 1.6 percent over the course of 2017, identifying 300.2 billion visits to piracy websites across music, TV and film, publishing, and software, said a report by MUSO, the global authority on digital piracy. The USA topped the list as the country making the most visits to piracy sites (27.9 billion), followed by Russian Federation (20.6 billion) and India (17 billion).

In India, overall visits to piracy websites in the country rose from 8.8 billion in 2016 to about 17 billion last year. Indians now visit websites offering pirated content nearly twice as much. This can also interpreted that every second, 285 Indians visit websites offering pirated music.

Nearly 75 per cent of the traffic came from mobile devices—higher than the global average of 60 percent.



The hope resulted from cheaper and faster data driven by the nation's richest man Mukesh Ambani. His Reliance Jio, which is India's first startup to turn profitable in shortest time since the launch, has unleashed a tariff war in the world's second-largest telecom market where a third of 1.3-billion Indians now own smartphones. Notably, Reliance Jio started its free services in September 2016 and then started offering cheaper data plans since April 2017. This resulted rivals to match prices to avoid losing users to the Jio's upstart. That gave subscribers access to faster data in the country. Reliance Jio is now India’s fourth largest operator with 15 percent of the total 1.15 billion wireless subscribers. Beside, Reliance Jio is also said to be working secretly with tech giant Google to develop an affordable smartphone that will work exclusively with Reliance-owned 4G network in India.

India, which is the world’s second most populous nation continues to lead the music piracy chart for the second straight year to became world's music piracy capital. Visits to websites offering unlicensed access to music more than doubled in 2017 over the previous year. Indians visited websites providing unlicensed music 9 billion times in 2017, according data shared by analytics firm MUSO to BloombergQuint.

Nevertheless, number of people listening to songs legally online is growing with each passing year thanks to a dozen of homegrown and global platforms like Gaana, Saavn, Hungama, Airtel Wynk, Apple Music, Google Music and Amazon Prime Music which let users access vast catalogues of songs online at cheap prices. Most of these platforms offer free music, and charge as little as Rs 29, or less than 50 cents, a month for ad-free access.

The number of people listening to songs legally online, according to an Ernst & Young report, is expected to jump threefold to 273 million by 2020.

Streaming apps helped the Rs 1,280-crore ($190 million) music industry struggling to tackle online piracy. In India, the organised music app market has three main players -- Bharti Airtel’s Wynk, Times Internet Gaana and Saavn. reliance Jio thus acquired Saavn last month to create a $1-billion music entity which now directly compete with its telecom operation competitor Bharti Airtel's Wynk.

Streaming websites -- other than above -- are the most popular outlet for accessing pirated content, although torrent-based film piracy slightly increased towards the end of the year. Surprisingly, torrent-based film piracy also increased globally towards the end of 2017. This could be as a result of users becoming frustrated with their regular web-streaming sites being blocked or shutdown, and therefore choosing to return to trusted and more traditional methods of piracy. Piracy by torrenting in film was more frequent than it was in TV in 2017, but still only made up around 20 percent of all film piracy.

Related Reading - Pirate Bay Founder Builds ‘Kopimashin’, A Piracy Tool Using Raspberry Pi

Going forward with piracy in India, according to the reports from the MPDA (Motion Picture Distributor’s Association), India has one of the highest film piracy rates per capita of any country in the world. According to a 2008 report by Ernst & Young accountants commissioned by the US India Business Council, pirated films led to the Indian film industry losing $959,000 and over 500,000 jobs that year.

In 2014, a number of website which include file storage sites, torrent file aggregators and Google’s URL shortener Goo.gl and even Google docs have been blocked in India following a complaint filed by Sony’s Multi Screen Media, which has the broadcasting rights for the FIFA World cup in which it alleged online piracy.

[The above news was first reported in Bloomberg Quint.]

Over 200 websites blocked in India after Sony piracy complaint

Football fever has gripped the whole world and with the interesting semifinals coming up, the enthusiasm is at an all time high right now.

As per a new court order, a number of website which include file storage sites, torrent file aggregators and Google’s URL shortener Goo.gl and even Google docs have been blocked in India. This order was passed following a complaint filed by Sony’s Multi Screen Media, which has the broadcasting rights for the FIFA World cup in which it alleged online piracy.

If some sourced are to be believed, Delhi High Court on 23 June 2014 passed an order instructing internet service providers to block around 472 websites.  The order was sanctioned by Justice V. Kameswar Rao. The order was allegedly later updated bringing the tally of blocked sites down to 219.

In the complaint filed by Sony, the company clearly states that many of these websites are indulging in streaming, hosting, providing access to, etc. which infringes the company’s exclusive rights and broadcast and re-production rights. The company further adds that such acts not only cause financial losses to the company but it also effects the government, as it takes away the legitimate revenue to the govt. through service tax etc. which are payable on the subscription fee payable by unnamed and named defendants if they operate their business illegitimately.

The Court has passed an ad-interim, ex-parte order stating that websites which have been named in the complaint, their partners, officers, proprietors, employees, servants, and all others in the capacity of principal or agent acting for or on behalf, or anyone claiming through, by or under it, and the websites listed, or any other site identified by the Plaintiff have been restrained from carrying out any sort of hosting, broadcasting, streaming, rebroadcasting, exhibiting, retransmitting, making available for viewing and downloading, providing access to the public, uploading, modifying, displaying, sharing, publishing through the internet, in any manner whatsoever, the Plaintiff broadcast, as broadcasted in its channels SONY PIX, SONY SIX, SONY SIX HD, SONY PIX HD in relation to the FIFA World Cup 2014 matches and content related thereto, so as to infringe the Plaintiff’s  broadcast reproduction rights.

Sony can now get any website which its suspects for piracy blocked.

Over 200 websites blocked in India after Sony piracy complaint

Football fever has gripped the whole world and with the interesting semifinals coming up, the enthusiasm is at an all time high right now.

As per a new court order, a number of website which include file storage sites, torrent file aggregators and Google’s URL shortener Goo.gl and even Google docs have been blocked in India. This order was passed following a complaint filed by Sony’s Multi Screen Media, which has the broadcasting rights for the FIFA World cup in which it alleged online piracy.

If some sourced are to be believed, Delhi High Court on 23 June 2014 passed an order instructing internet service providers to block around 472 websites.  The order was sanctioned by Justice V. Kameswar Rao. The order was allegedly later updated bringing the tally of blocked sites down to 219.

In the complaint filed by Sony, the company clearly states that many of these websites are indulging in streaming, hosting, providing access to, etc. which infringes the company’s exclusive rights and broadcast and re-production rights. The company further adds that such acts not only cause financial losses to the company but it also effects the government, as it takes away the legitimate revenue to the govt. through service tax etc. which are payable on the subscription fee payable by unnamed and named defendants if they operate their business illegitimately.

The Court has passed an ad-interim, ex-parte order stating that websites which have been named in the complaint, their partners, officers, proprietors, employees, servants, and all others in the capacity of principal or agent acting for or on behalf, or anyone claiming through, by or under it, and the websites listed, or any other site identified by the Plaintiff have been restrained from carrying out any sort of hosting, broadcasting, streaming, rebroadcasting, exhibiting, retransmitting, making available for viewing and downloading, providing access to the public, uploading, modifying, displaying, sharing, publishing through the internet, in any manner whatsoever, the Plaintiff broadcast, as broadcasted in its channels SONY PIX, SONY SIX, SONY SIX HD, SONY PIX HD in relation to the FIFA World Cup 2014 matches and content related thereto, so as to infringe the Plaintiff’s  broadcast reproduction rights.

Sony can now get any website which its suspects for piracy blocked.