Online piracy of movies and TV has frozen in Australia — but winter is coming anew

The latest season of Game of Thrones was pirated more than 1 billion times.

But winter is coming for those who illegally stream or download TV and movie content.

New research, to be revealed by Creative Content Australia Executive Director Lori Flekser at the Screen Forever conference in Melbourne today, shows the growth of online piracy has frozen over the last year in Australia.

Figures remain static at 21 per cent of adults (aged 18-64) admitting to some form of piracy.

Flekser, whose anti-piracy organisation commissioned the research, puts the freeze down to three factors:

Site-blocking — a Federal Court ruling in August blocked access to 59 online piracy sites and further actions are likely to be brought.

Increased access to legitimate streaming services — Foxtel Now, Netflix, Stan and Amazon Prime Video all have growing subscriber bases in Australia.

Malware — worldwide studies show that pirate sites are the number one way of propagating malware and computer viruses.

“Site blocking does appear to be working — just for the simple reason it’s becoming harder to get to the content,” Flekser told News Corp Australia.

While the CCA’s research (conducted into September) was too early to measure the full impact of that Federal Court ruling, Flekser said it is “clear that the majority of people looking for pirated content are coming up against those site blocks.

“The real problem,” she added, “is what they do next.”

The research shows that while users do sometimes head for a legitimate content source after encountering a blocked site, the majority (77 per cent of adults and 74 per cent of teens) will usually just search for an alternative pirate site. As Flekser put it: “The majority are still using the back door.”

Flekser described the task of convincing internet search giant Google to “come to the party” and stop facilitating access to such pirate sites as “a worldwide challenge”.

When the CCA’s Price of Piracy public awareness campaign, starring Bryan Brown, was launched in August, the star’s warnings about your illegal movie download coming with an unwanted side order of malware may have sounded like a scare tactic.

But this new research shows the link between pirated movies and TV shows and malware to be very real: among persistent pirates, 59 per cent of adult and 47 per cent of teens have had their computers infected by a virus or malware.

“One out of three pirate sites have the ability to infect your computer with malware, and (getting an infection) is 28 times more likely than if you go to a legitimate site,” Flekser said. “You don’t even have to click on a link now, they call them ‘drive-by’ (infections) — just opening a site can infect your computer.”

While Flekser was taking a largely positive message to the industry professionals gathering at the annual Screen Forever conference, she also offered a warning about a new frontier in the piracy battle: set top boxes such as Kodi and Roku.

The boxes, which can aggregate all users’ digital content and make it accessible on their TV, are perfectly legal to buy. Yet many, Flekser explained, come “fully loaded” or “jail broken” — with apps that scrape the internet to find illegal sources of films and TV shows.

“This is the first year we’ve looked at it, so we have nothing to compare it to. But around 31 per cent of Australians are now using set top boxes, and 25 per cent of those people are using infringing apps. So we have a growing problem there.”

Illegal downloads aren’t just a problem for huge international productions such as Game of Thrones.

Australian films such as Mad Max: Fury Road (illegally downloaded 56 million times), Hacksaw Ridge (more than 11 million illegal downloads) and Lion (in the multi-millions and counting) are also impacted.

That, said Flekser, “has a deep effect on the pockets and not just on revenue recoupment for a film but on the confidence of investors”.

She knows anecdotally from filmmakers that genre films in particular — such as the frequently pirated horror genre — are struggling to attract finance.

“If you’re an investor and you know that a fifth of the revenue is going to be stolen online, you’re more reluctant to put your money into it. That’s the real issue for our local industry.”