For those unaware, MPA is an American trade association representing the five major film studios of the United States, as well as the video streaming service Netflix. It works towards promoting effective copyright protection, reducing piracy, curbing copyright infringement, and expanding market access in the motion picture and television industry. Along with other entertainment industry groups, the MPA also sends a yearly summary of infamous foreign piracy markets that includes pirate sites, apps and hosting providers, to the US Trade Representative (USTR). This helps U.S. Government to find current threats and call on foreign governments to take appropriate action against copyright infringement. In recent years, the MPA’s annual submission list has mainly consisted of popular piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, Openload, and Fmovies with their names resurfacing time and again. MPA’s list also highlights mobile apps, unauthorized IPTV services, and hosting companies. Another local company to repeatedly feature on this list is Cloudflare, an American CDN provider, that has many piracy sites as its customers. “The Pirate Bay, and other notorious pirate sites remain Cloudflare customers despite repeated notices of infringement to Cloudflare,” the MPA notes. Other than the regulars, the two new entrants that have made to MPA’s list this year is 1XBET and Baidu Pan. While 1XBET is one of the largest gambling companies known for its advertising playing in ‘cam’ copies of movies, Baidu Pan, is a file-hosting service operated by the biggest search engine, Baidu, Inc. in China. Coming to 1XBET, visitors to ‘pirate’ sites are no strangers to this Russian-based betting company’s adverts that appear on more than thousands of so-called ‘cam’ releases. “1XBET is a Russian gambling site that has started to support some of the earliest releases of infringing theatrical camcords and infringing streams of live television broadcasts. It has become the third most active online advertiser in Russia,” the MPA notifies the USTR. “Reportedly, the online casino pays to insert visual and audio advertisements into new piracy content sources incentivizing camcord and livestreaming piracy. 1XBET’s watermark with promotion codes is ‘burned’ into the video files of infringing camcord recordings. Thus, piracy is used as a vehicle to support this online gambling giant.” For the uninitiated, 1XBET operates in more than 50 countries and is also a sponsor, partner of sports competitions, sports clubs, including Italian Serie A, and football clubs like Barcelona, Liverpool, and Chelsea. Another newcomer in the MPA’s list is Baidu Pan, which is mostly used to share copyright-infringing material. “Large quantities of infringing content are stored on Baidu Pan with links disseminated through popular Chinese social media platforms and piracy linking sites,” the MPA writes in its submission. With more than 75 percent market share in China, Baidu is the second-largest search engine in the world, notes MPA. As a result, it is very important for the company to follow arduous content protection standards as well as cooperate with right holders, the group adds. While Baidu has taken some initiative in taking down tools in recent years, its takedown rates and timeframes, however, have remained in constant or too long, the MPA says. “Baidu should be encouraged to do more, including improve implementation of its takedown tools, apply rigorous filtering technology to identify infringing content, and take more effective action to suspend or terminate repeat infringers to ensure all rights holders are treated equally and infringing content and links are removed expeditiously,” the submission reads.
