On May 22nd, the European Commission published the fourth edition of the Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List, a document that monitors and analyzes online platforms and services involved in the distribution of illegal content and counterfeiting. Drafted with the contribution of public and private stakeholders, the report provides an updated overview of the main actors, business models, and trends in digital piracy, and aims to encourage effective counteraction by national and European authorities, rights holders, and market operators.
The core of the Watch List is the mapping of types of online services that illegally offer copyrighted content and/or facilitate access to it. The Commission categorizes them into nine groups, each with its specific technical characteristics.
- Cyberlockers: centralized cloud storage services used as database of illegal content.
- Stream-ripping: platforms that allow users to download audiovisual content from legal streaming services, bypassing the technical protections set by these services.
- Linking/referring websites: sites that aggregate and index links to pirated content hosted elsewhere, facilitating its search and access. They combine direct streaming and links to cyberlockers.
- Peer-to-peer: sites that allow file sharing through peer-to-peer technology, acting as directories for torrent links.
- Unauthorized download sites: portals that offer direct downloads of pirated content.
- Piracy apps: applications dedicated to illegal streaming or downloading, often distributed through alternative stores or external links.
- Hosting providers: online services that host pirated content or support illegal streaming infrastructures.
- Unauthorized IPTV services: pirate services offering illegal streaming of TV channels, sports events, and films via low-cost subscriptions or pre-configured devices (HDMI dongles).
- Piracy support services: a cross-cutting category that includes domain registrars, various digital services such as VPNs, alternative DNS, CDNs, Reverse Proxies, financial intermediaries, and advertising space purchases.
The report highlights how the landscape of digital piracy is evolving very quickly. Pirate IPTV services now represent the most significant threat to the audiovisual industry, with a 10% increase in illegal users compared to last year. These services are characterized by a complex network of restreaming and resale, often supported by infrastructures located in countries with permissive regulations, making counteraction extremely difficult.
Additionally, the report highlights the emergence of services based on artificial intelligence, including voice cloning technologies that allow the creation of musical deepfakes, and tools for manipulating streams aimed at revenue frauds, phenomena that represent new frontiers of illegal exploitation of digital content.
The fourth edition of the Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List confirms that digital piracy is a global, persistent, and ever-evolving phenomenon, increasingly integrated into technologically sophisticated networks and business models. Most of these illegal activities hide behind advanced technological infrastructures offered by major internet service providers, whose operational models and approaches significantly complicate the identification and removal of pirated content.
In the face of these challenges, a joint and coordinated global effort is essential to concretely hold accountable all intermediaries offering services that facilitate the distribution or ease of access to pirated content, establishing strict and shared timelines for content removal and service interruption, with particular attention to live streams, which represent one of the most critical frontiers of digital piracy.
