The entertainment industries are becoming increasingly frustrated by major Internet platforms that are, in their view, not doing enough to tackle online piracy.

While legitimate user-generated content platforms respond to takedown requests, which they are legally required to, most don’t go any further. This, despite repeated calls from industry groups for help.

Over the past several years, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) has made some progress, partnering with several intermediaries, including payment providers and advertising companies. However, it has struggled to persuade major user-generated platforms and social media sites to be more proactive.

This frustration is fueled by more recent developments which have seen these same platforms take voluntary action against hate speech, fake news, violence, and other offensive content that populates social media timelines.

Twitter, for example, took action against more than half a million accounts over “hateful content” during the first half of the year, helped by ‘artificial intelligence’. YouTube and Facebook also report that they are doing more to proactively detect hate speech, while other online services are taking voluntary action as well.

The MPA has followed this trend. The group recently brought the topic up during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on “Fostering a Healthier Internet to Protect Consumers.” The hearing dealt with an ongoing examination of Section 230 of the Communications Act.

Section 230 shields online services from liability. However, Congress also intended it to encourage these platforms to take reasonable steps to deter undesirable behavior. While Section 230 doesn’t apply to copyright, the MPA’s SVP and Senior Counsel, Neil Fried, chimed in with a written testimony for the record.

Fried notes that the liability protections are similar to those of the DMCA, where copyright is at the center. Also, the complaint that Internet services are not doing enough to prevent harmful content from spreading, is similar to the MPA’s complaint that they do too little to prevent copyright infringement.

The MPA’s General Senior Vice President highlights these hate-speech enforcement efforts and acknowledges there are complex issues to address – especially with subjects that are not by definition illegal in law, since free speech is a great good.

“A few companies have recently developed systems to proactively identify posts promoting hate and violence, and have invoked their terms of service to terminate accounts of those engaged in such activity, although not before wrestling with concerns over the impact on expression,” Fried writes.

However, that’s not much of a problem when it comes to copyright, the MPA believes.

“If online intermediaries and user-generated content platforms can proactively identify such content and terminate service in these cases, surely they can terminate service and take other effective action in cases of clearly illegal conduct, which present brighter lines and don’t raise the same speech concerns,” Fried adds.

Fried suggests that online services should use the same tools they employ to detect hate speech and other harmful content to proactively remove pirated content too. Copyright infringement is prohibited in the terms of services of these companies, so they would have room to do so.

While Fried is right that copyright infringement is more clearly defined than harmful content, dealing with it proactively is not without challenges. Unlike harmful content, some people may have the right to post some copyrighted content, while others do not. And fair use is hard to capture by an algorithm as well.

The MPA nonetheless hopes that online platforms will cooperate. In addition, it wants to see if current liability exemptions can be overhauled, using legislation to motivate Internet companies to do more.

This was also made clear to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And while possible legal fixes are being considered, the US should not include such liability provisions into new trade agreements, the MPA’s SVP notes.

“In the meantime, as Congress reexamines online liability limitations, the United States should refrain from including such limitations in future trade agreements, which runs the risk of freezing the current framework in place,” Fried writes.

This follows an earlier recommendation from the House Judiciary Committee. Last month the Committee urged lawmakers not to include DMCA-style safe harbors in trade agreements while alternatives are being discussed.

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A copy of Neil Fried’s statement before the House Committee on Energy & Commerce is available here (pdf) .

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Last Friday, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN teamed up with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment to take action against a massive supplier of pirate movies and TV shows.

Moonwalk, as the Content Delivery Network was known, supplied an estimated 80% of known Russian streaming portals. These sites were able to embed a video player which presented not only movies and TV shows from Moonwalk, but advertising too. For this service, Moonwalk reportedly paid the sites $0.60 per 1000 views.

After bailiffs acting on BREIN’s behalf served ex parte court orders on five Netherlands-based hosting providers, which required them to disconnect and preserve evidence on Moonwalk’s operations, the CDN shut down, stating it would “ NEVER be up again “.

This week TorrentFreak spoke with cybersecurity company Group-IB . The Singapore-based firm, which is a partner of both INTERPOL and Europol, had previously supplied us with information detailing the activities of Moonwalk. It has now provided an interesting update on the fallout from last week’s legal action.

Group-IB says that at the time of its shutdown, Moonwalk was even bigger than the conservative figures published by BREIN last week suggest. While BREIN claimed more than 26,000 movies and 10,000 TV shows were stored, Group-IB says that 28,258 movies were being distributed alongside 14,549 TV shows at the time of the shutdown.

However, it’s the knock-on effect and the state of the market after the takedown that raises the most interest.

Group-IB informs us that another big “pirate-powered” CDN known as HDGO has also shut down following the action by BREIN and its partners. The cybersecurity firm believes that the closures are connected because HDGO used some of the same infrastructure as Moonwalk.

“Compared with other CDNs HDGO provided new content faster and guaranteed a higher income for pirate websites’ owners,” says Dmitry Tyunkin, Deputy Director of Anti-Piracy and Brand Protection at Group-IB.

A second “pirate-powered” CDN, known online as Kodik, has also shut down as a result of the Moonwalk action. Again, Kodik is believed to have used the same infrastructure as Moonwalk and HDGO, suggesting that the BREIN court orders may have had an even wider effect.

“The Kodik CDN used some of Moonwalk’s servers, especially the ones where TV show content was stored. According to our estimates, Kodik could have lost 8,000 out of 17,000 TV shows. It’s known that there was a pirated content ‘exchange agreement’ between Moonwalk and Kodik,” Tyunkin adds.

It’s estimated that Moonwalk’s CDN player could have been built-in into thousands of websites so the removal of the players could have an even more profound effect.

“In the short-term perspective, the shutdown of Moonwalk, HDGO and Kodik could mean a big blow to online piracy in Russia and can potentially contain pirated video content distribution for some time.”

But Moonwalk, HDGO, and Kodik weren’t the only players in the ‘pirate CDN’ market. Group-IB says that despite the magnitude of the recent efforts and initial fallout, in the long-term the “many competitors” of Moonwalk are likely to step in to facilitate supply.

The company believes there are 10 “pirate-powered” CDNs still supplying the market, including major players HDVB, VideoCDN, and Collaps.

“According to Group-IB’s data, 80% of pirated movies in Russia are now streamed, a figure that increases to 90% for TV shows,” the company says.

“The majority of Russian online pirates use CDNs because they store hundreds of thousands of files containing films and TV series, and offer a technical service that allows to automatically place this content on pirate websites.

“Some of these technical CDN providers also offer web modules that autofill sites with film posters and descriptions, and in some cases even supply unique reviews.”

Finally, in terms of impact on the global market, Group-IB believes the shutdowns have the potential to affect between 5 and 10 percent of worldwide supply but cautions that this is “definitely a temporary change.”

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