An anti-piracy service designed to offer copyright holders an affordable and highly effective means to fight back against content thieves, Takedown Piracy (TDP) reportedly removed more than 20 million content infringements during the past four years and today continues to closely monitor leading piracy websites, providing its clients with immediate service and protection — using technology to tackle content piracy and helping producers get their profits under control.
Takedown Piracy actively tracks at least nine different forms of pirated content, including cyberlockers, torrent sites, tube sites, auctioned or unauthorized DVD resellers, search engines, image hosts, blogs, forums, and social media.
Digital pirates are exactly that — people who profit off the work of others. -Nate Glass
TDP’s newest tool is known as “Nemesis,” and it is credited with removing 100,000 pirated full-length movies and scenes to date.
Named after the Greek goddess who was heralded as an agent of divine punishment for wrongdoing or hubris, Nemesis analyzes tube sites to pinpoint videos that are likely to be infringing on copyrights, allowing the Takedown Piracy team to verify infringements and have the pirated content removed.
‘The goddess Nemesis carried out retribution against those who committed evil deeds and received undeserved good fortune,” states Takedown Piracy owner Nate Glass. “Digital pirates are exactly that — people who profit off the work of others. Nemesis and Takedown Piracy are coming to get them, and we have already found a ton of movies, which may have otherwise gone undetected.”
Glass says that the pirate community is already feeling the wrath of Nemesis.
“We’ve already seen several prolific pirate uploaders ‘retire’ or stop uploading movies altogether,” Glass stated. “We’ve been able to get other [pirates] kicked off the sites by showing they are repeat infringers.”
According to Glass, many of the offending accounts were being used for financial gain in addition to uploading free content.
“A lot of uploaders use the stolen content as a way to promote their own businesses,” Glass explains. “We’re more than happy to dish out justice and put these guys out of business.”
Although Glass says that he can’t give away too many details about Nemesis’ functionality for obvious reasons, he notes that the program is something that he has spent a good deal of time and money on developing and that it will basically analyze all of the videos on any given tube site, and then sort out the ones that are very likely promo uploads from those that are likely pirate uploads.
“While I’ve always been very effective at finding our clients’ content on tube sites, it could be time consuming and there was a lot being missed,” Glass told XBIZ. “We don’t want to waste time looking over clips that were uploaded by our clients for promotional purposes; we just want to focus on those videos that are very likely infringing.”
Nemesis not only reduces overall search time, it also discovers videos that might have been overlooked before.
“For example, we found a video for one of our clients that was a full movie ripped from a DVD and divided into two parts. But they were uploaded with a title along the lines of ‘xyqucsyuys,’ basically just a random string of characters, with no tags or anything,” Glass stated. “That kind of thing we might not have found before, but with this program, we found it.”
Another major advantage of Nemesis is that it removes the need for tube sites to participate in any form of program, which also enables scanning of those tube sites that want no part of helping anyone find the thousands of pirated videos on their sites, since that is the source of their lifeblood.
Glass says that with the help of Nemesis, once a given tube site is targeted it takes only a relatively short period of time before a clients’ content is completely removed from the site.
“Then it just becomes a matter of watching for newly uploaded content, which this program easily allows us to do as well,” Glass notes. “I am really proud of how this program is working and as we implement it on more sites, I think we’ll really see the landscape changed for pirate uploaders.”
Despite the efficacy of Nemesis, Glass admits that the program is not going to make the tubes “go away” or anything grandiose like that.
‘Sadly there are so many studios that are just out and out apathetic and won’t lift a finger to control the spread of their content,” Glass told XBIZ. “I could name five or six huge studios that are so lazy in policing their content that they are simply part of the problem now. As long as those guys allow the rampant pillaging of their libraries, there’s going to be enough full length scenes to keep tubes happy for the foreseeable future.”
Glass explains that if those last few bystanders would get off the sidelines and into the game, tubes would be left with far limited sources of content; such as sponsor content and content from defunct studios, which is mostly older material from the VHS/DVD booms that was put out by studios that did not produce good content in the first place, hence their disappearance from the marketplace today.
Two niches that are especially problematic in terms of tubes are amateur and Asian.
“It boggles my mind how much of the stuff on the tubes is full length Asian content and I don’t see how anyone can make any money in the JAV market with it like this,” Glass offered. “And while amateur content has its appeal, people still by and large want the professionally produced content; and one could see a day when tubes might run into 2257 issues with amateur content.”
Will the tubes of the future be focused on this fare?
“If tubes were limited to just those kinds of offerings,” Glass concludes, “I think that’s a scenario my clients would welcome with open arms.”