Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 4, 2019 - February 10, 2019

Einstein never surfed the Net; nor did he play Whack-A-Mole. But as a bit of a cynic, he would have noted the similarities between attempts to stop online piracy and to win that children’s game — and applied his definition of insanity to both.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the gist. But when you have got treasure to the tune of billions and know that it is wanted by half of mankind, you are not going to accept being told that protection is futile.

Under attack from more pirates than ever sailed the Caribbean, the English Premier League (EPL) has ramped up its defences tech-wise and gone on the attack. After cleaning up its own waters, it has arrived in the Straits of Malacca and sent a broadside to all would-be raiders: Try to stream our programmes and we are going to shut you down.

Piracy was earmarked as a growing threat by Astro chief operating officer Henry Tan in a previous interview. And Fifa’s discovery that there were no less than 29,700 pirate sites around the globe during the last World Cup revealed the extent of the problem.

But football is fighting back and the EPL, at least, thinks it is winning. During the 2017/18 season, some 200,000 illegal streams of matches were either blocked or disrupted in the host nation. Over 450,000 clips were also taken down. It is successes like this that enable the league’s director of legal services, Kevin Plumb, to claim, “We have never been as good at combating [online piracy as we are now.”

On a flying visit to Kuala Lumpur, London-based Plumb said he hopes to use this expertise in this neck of the worldwide woods. He said, “We have a highly skilled internal team and also use a lot of experts. We have experts for pretty much every area of anti-piracy you can imagine and we try to get the best people in the world.”

Although the lawyer denied that last month’s opening of an EPL office in Singapore was primarily to take a cutlass to piracy, he said, “It is just one of a number of challenges we face as a business. The office is not just about Singapore, it is about Malaysia as well, about Thailand and the wider region. We do not have a history of just talking about anti-piracy. Talking about it is important. We need to talk to the fans. We are doers — we will take action. We were not going to come here and not be engaged.”

He was just as buccaneering about the product. “We think our content is some of the best in the world and needs to be protected by the best people in the world. We also have a number of amazing things that are happening to the business which are hugely exciting and extremely beneficial.

“The competition this year is amazing and there is no better boost to our business than a brilliant competition on the pitch. We have brilliant teams, some of the best managers in the world, the stadium infrastructure is getting better as well. The new Tottenham stadium is about to open and the grounds are full. In many ways, it has never been better.”

But he did acknowledge, “There is no silver bullet and I think any successful anti-piracy strategy has to be holistic. So it needs to consider the human nature of every territory — every territory is different. The reasons that people decide to pirate are different and the strategies that work are different. And every territory has its challenges with legislation.”

It was a high court ruling that proved a game changer in the UK. It came in July 2017, when the country’s leading internet service providers (ISPs) were ordered to block and disrupt servers hosting illegal streams of EPL matches. Then, last July, in a third iteration of the act, the law was given even more teeth. Now, ISPs can act on pirates the moment they are detected.

Explained Plumb: “We provide them with IP addresses of servers that are carrying pirated versions of our content. And we are doing that all the time during a match. There is no block until the match starts, [when it does] the block kicks in and then during those 90 minutes, we are sending out addresses, putting them into their systems until the end of the match and then the block is released. It is very dynamic. It is minute-by-minute. It is a very balanced enforcement method.

“Cutting streams off at source has been hugely impactful and changed the landscape completely for us. We believe that blocking is a proportionate and justifiable way of stopping access to our content in a way that does not target consumers, and just stops the problem.”

The question screaming to be asked is, would it work here? He said: “Any form of enforcement will involve law enforcement agencies. And my understanding of it is that there are very supportive law enforcement agencies here in Malaysia.”

He called proposed changes in Singapore’s copyright laws to ban the sale of set-top boxes as “hugely positive” and added: “We have done work in Thailand and Hong Kong recently and the law enforcement agencies there were really helpful and supportive.

“We are looking at working with Astro in as many ways as we can — whether it is on blocking, on disruption or in any areas of anti-piracy. So it is working with what there is here and trying to change that if that is possible. In some territories, blocking might not be the best solution so we have to talk to the fans and assess the problem. Only when we have done that can we decide where we want to get to.”

Asked who the pirates were, he said, “Mostly criminal gangs — it is no longer the domain of the teenager in his bedroom.”

But while he also stressed that the layman need not fear a knock on the door, he said: “If we do our job on the awareness front, it will not be as easy for people to say ‘Oh, we didn’t think there was anything wrong with it’.

“They will become more aware of the risks, the pop-ups and the malware involved in looking at pirate websites is astonishing. It could be adult content or all sorts of material you do not want your family to see.”

One of the risks is the thing going down and, in an interview with Channel News Asia, Plumb used the Premier League’s greatest moment as a graphic illustration. “Can you imagine if you watched the 2012 match of Manchester City playing Queen’s Park Rangers on the stream and in stoppage time [Mario] Balotelli passes to [Sergio] Aguero … and the stream cuts off? That would do one’s head in. That’s game over.”

But it sounds like this one will run and run. Here, legislation must be passed and then enforced, and pirate is an evocative word. It used to mean a man with an eye-patch and a peg leg. Part of the problem is that some of the copyright laws seem as if they were drawn up in the same era.


Bob Holmes is a longtime sports writer specialising in football

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