RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The increase in internet connections has brought benefits and convenience to Brazilians, but has been associated with a serious side effect in the field of copyrights: the growth of audiovisual piracy.
According to the most recent estimates by the Brazilian Cinema Agency (ANCINE), annual losses are projected at R$9.7 (US$1.8) billion for the pay-TV market, R$3.9 billion for the film and series segment, and R$2 billion in tax revenue. And the rate is growing: in the pay TV sector alone, losses have been mounting between R$700 million and R$800 million each year.
These figures place Brazilians among the largest consumers of audiovisual piracy. “Today only two countries consume more illegal content than Brazil: the United States and Russia,” says Eduardo Carneiro, ANCINE’s anti-piracy coordinator.
A combination of the size of the national market, one of the world’s largest, and the ease with which digital technology has become available to pirates has led to Brazil becoming so vulnerable to piracy.
Illegal cable TV connections still exist. Their use is very common in areas controlled by militias, where criminals force residents to hire and pay for illegal connections.
However, digitalization has led two other methods to surpass illegal cable: TV boxes – decoders whose apps pirate the broadcast signal – and unauthorized versions of IPTV, which includes both websites and lists of pirate links.
“Piracy is adjusting itself to the technologies of the moment. With the internet, it became more sophisticated and invisible,” says Marcelo Bechara, director of institutional relations and media regulation for the Globo Group, Latin America’s largest media conglomerate.
Pirates monitor the population’s consumption patterns and the market’s overall development, says the executive. In the VCR era, the best known face of piracy was street vendors selling illegal videotapes, often of questionable quality.
Later, it was DVDs. The expansion of the internet has raised this practice to unprecedented levels and made it much more difficult to fight. “There is no longer a limit to physical media. Now, it depends on the storage capacity [in cloud computing], which gives a feeling of infinitude,” says Bechara.
What most consumers don’t realize is that by giving in to piracy they are risking the integrity and security of their data, alert authorities and security experts. TV boxes are not, by themselves, an illegal product.
The purpose of boxes – easily found in electronics stores and websites – is to convert ordinary televisions into “Smart TVs,” with internet access, which enables watching streaming services and video websites available.
The problem is that many devices enter the country illegally, bypassing domestic certification, and include built-in apps that pick up the pirated signal. From the technological standpoint, it serves two purposes.
Pirates use the apps to exploit vulnerabilities and enter the consumer’s network, in which they can monitor the victim’s digital life and steal data. Pictures, messages, addresses, banking information – nothing is safe. The same goes for pirate websites and link lists.
Reverse engineering work has shown that criminals have at their disposal a multitude of resources using tampered TV boxes. One of them is to control the customers’ equipment without them realizing it.
The technique is not new and creates “zombie computers”. The machines are networked and used to spread unwanted advertising messages, spam, or to perform DDoS attacks, which occur when too many simultaneous accesses overload a website and cause it to go offline.
Hackers are finding new uses for “zombies”. Mining cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoins, is one of them. Mining is the term used for the process of validating transactions with digital currencies, which demands a massive consumption of electrical power.
By controlling the users’ network, hackers keep the money resulting from these transactions and the victim is literally the one who pays the bill.
Despite all the risks, piracy is still widely perceived as a minor offense. Many Brazilians consider it an acceptable alternative for those who can’t get a job and live informally. This innocuous image undermines an understanding of the threats involved and helps perpetuate the practice, experts alert.
A point of criticism is that the very word “pirate” refers to movies of the genre – starring well-meaning anti-heroes – and masks the fact that, in the real world, the Robin Hood logic doesn’t exist. Pirates don’t steal from the rich and give to the poor. They keep the spoils, and often use the money to finance other types of crime.
“The potential damage is tremendous for society as a whole,” says Oscar Simões, president of the Brazilian Association of Pay-TV (ABTA). The estimate is that over 5 million pirates are at work in Brazil, says the executive, with great impact on the content production and broadcasting chain.
According to research conducted by Mobile Time/Opinion Box in March, some 33 million people in Brazil, or 27.2% of internet users over 16 years of age, watch pay TV content through one or more illegal means. Unless the situation changes, up to 150,000 jobs are expected to be lost by companies in the sector over the next few years.
There is consensus that all parties involved must work together to find an integrated solution to this problem. “There is no other alternative but cooperation,” says Simões, from ABTA.
Companies, associations, regulatory bodies and government agencies – such as ANCINE, the Federal Treasury, the Federal Police, the Civil Police and the National Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL) – have begun to exchange more information to cover the various operation fronts. The results have proven positive.
In November 2019, Operation 404, coordinated by the Ministry of Justice and Public Safety’s Integrated Operations Secretariat (SEOPI), blocked 210 websites and 100 illegal apps, also removing them from internet search engines. The police served 30 warrants in 12 states.
In the second phase, a year later, 252 websites and 65 apps were taken offline and 25 search warrants were served. Only one of the targets had 775,000 registered users and a turnover of over R$94 (US$17.6) million per year. Operation 404 is considered the largest anti-piracy action ever conducted in Latin America.
“The fight needs to be constant. It can’t stop. The police are working on initiatives like 404, which can and will be conducted,” says police chief Alesandro Barreto, coordinator of SEOPI’s Cyber Operations Laboratory.
The lab comprises police officers with technical skills and experience in digital crimes, which range from money laundering to child pornography.
The coordinated efforts have proven crucial to achieve tangible results, says delegate Barreto. “The private sector has the data and the police have the expertise. With coordination, society as a whole wins.”
The newest onslaught against piracy, this time in the field of consumer education, began May 22. ABTA launched an awareness campaign to address the habit of using illegal audiovisual content as if it were not a crime.
In the coming months, 8 advertising films will be shown in both open and closed channel programming breaks. The campaign was created by Globo and produced by Mixer Films.
By featuring children drawing their parents’ attention, the campaign exposes the contradiction of adults who convey ethical concepts to their children in several areas, but set a bad example in the case of audiovisual piracy, explains André Dias, Globo Group’s director of special projects.
In one of the films, children are repeatedly reminded that it is not “legal” (“cool”) to dump trash in the street or buy counterfeit sneakers, but their parents are not concerned about watching movies and series on illegal websites. The final message is the pun – piracy is not “legal” (cool) either.