Hollywood is cracking down on piracy (again)

Charles Rivkin, chairman of the Motion Picture Association, making a presentation. The industry group is renewing its legislative efforts on Capitol Hill, says New York Times reporter Brooks Barnes. David Becker/Getty Images for CinemaCon

Retailers call it shrinkage, but in Hollywood, it's called piracy. We are talking about the theft and distribution of stolen movies and TV shows. There's been a bit of a piracy boom in the streaming age, and media companies are putting more resources than ever to curtail it.

The industry's main pirate-hunting agency, called the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, has a new head recruited from the FBI, and there's also been a renewed push to pass legislation that would give media companies tools to block access to websites with pirated material.

Behind this is the specter of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a 2012 bill intended to curtail piracy that met with heavy resistance from the tech industry and ultimately failed. Now, over a decade later, media companies have largely taken things into their own hands, partnering with law enforcement around the world.

"The more that you crack down on piracy, the more you direct people to paying customers," said Brooks Barnes, a reporter who covers Hollywood for The New York Times. "And they're looking for every dime and nickel under the couch cushions."

Barnes wrote about Hollywood's pirate-hunting efforts and spoke with "Marketplace" host Kai Ryssdal about what he discovered. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: Give us a sense of scale here. You write in this piece that there is some evidence the audience for piracy has actually grown the past five years. What's going on?

Brooks Barnes: It's one of those problems that has kind of faded from the sort of the front, right? But piracy is only growing, in part because of the growth in streaming. It's become much easier for the bad guys to steal TV shows and movies. And you have to remember that these streaming services, Disney+, Netflix, Amazon Prime, are global, so it's not just people in the U.S. that are able to access those streams.

Ryssdal: Right. And we should be clear, this is not my kids — not that they would ever do this — this is not my kids using my Netflix password when they don't live with us anymore?

Barnes: No, Hollywood doesn't like that either. But this is, this is sort of as described by the Motion Picture Association, which is the lobbying group orchestrating the crackdown on piracy, this is what they call global organized crime, people also involved with sex trafficking, money laundering, pretty big operations.

Ryssdal: And we should be clear here, this is not people walking into a movie theater and, like back in the old days, taking out the VHS recorder and videoing it, and you'd see a guy's, you know, head in your way, right? This is different.

Barnes: Yes. There is still some of that, especially in, in Russia, for example, or countries where Hollywood isn't operating at the moment. But this is, really, streaming is what, what this is centered on. And some of these sites — as it's described to me, I haven't been on them myself — they look like Netflix. You pay a subscription price and all of this content is on there. Some people were just convicted of operating a site called Jetflix, which was an illegal streaming site. And the lineup was just jaw-dropping in terms of what was on there, larger than the combined catalogs of Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video.

Ryssdal: That's a lot of content. What is Hollywood doing? They've got like a whole wing of the Motion Picture Association devoted to this.

Barnes: Yes, it's called ACE, which is how they sort of coordinated, and underneath that umbrella are 50-plus companies around the world, all media companies. And then they kind of put together a case, often they do the initial steps, and then kind of partner with law enforcement in different countries. And most of this is overseas. In the United States, the number of pirated sites still hovers around 200, which is a lot, it seems to me. But that's down from 1,400, for example, when they started this. Progress there, but it's continued to grow overseas. The top three English-language pirate sites are based in Vietnam.

Ryssdal: So where does this go now? Because it's like any kind of computer hacking, right? The bad guys are always a step ahead.

Barnes: Yep, always a step ahead. So Charles Rivkin, who's the chairman of the MPAA, he's given a couple speeches about how the organization is renewing an effort on Capitol Hill to get legislation. They're looking at expanding into live sports, which has become more valuable. And they have a new pirate-hunter-in-chief from the FBI.

Ryssdal: Without being too defeatist about it, they've got to play the long game, right?

Barnes: It's not going away, right? There's so much pressure on media companies to make money from streaming. And the more that you crack down on piracy, the more you direct people to paying customers, and they're looking for every dime and nickel under the couch cushions.

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