Piracy is a huge factor hurting content providers since long. However, it is easy for content providers to take down pirated videos when they are uploaded to the web, but stopping live streams is another task. New live streams keep popping up faster than the copyright holders can take them down. However, this can soon be rectified. Cisco has created a new technology — Streaming Piracy Prevention — delivered to automatically cut off illegal live feeds.
This approach uses a forensic watermark to identify the sessions and subscriptions being used to leak the video, and shuts down those sources in real time. Companies wouldn’t have to send legal warnings and hope that offending streams go down before the event is over. They could take actions as soon as they get to know about a feed, without any lag in slowing things down.
While this technique is intelligent, the technique raises a few important questions. What if you have no qualms paying to watch big sporting events? Just because a company can circumvent the usual notice-and-takedown routine doesn’t mean it should. What happens of there’s an error, or if local laws require notices. While the possibility of a mistake isn’t high, it’s probable that copyright holders could create more trouble than usual while clamping down on unofficial streams.
