How have we taken pre-release movie piracy down from 60% to 0.06%?

The short answer?

Decentralised detection. 

The long answer:

Depending which market film and television producers and distributors operate within, anywhere between 20 and 60% of pre-release screener content will be leaked online.

Custos, using Screener Copy, have recently proven our technology’s ability to take that number down to zero, in markets we’ve entered in North America, Japan, India, the United Kingdom, and South Africa.

Our flagship product is its blockchain-based, patented watermarking technology, available as an API integration service for digital content protection.

Clients who wish to protect video, audio, eBooks, or documents can integrate with Custos’ API to register, assign, and monitor media items – with minimal impact on their existing workflow.

The API provides a simple way to protect digital content, without resorting to hard DRM technologies.

It achieves this by imperceptibly marking each copy of a video entrusted to a recipient, for example, with a unique, imperceptible watermark that directly identifies the recipient, should that content be leaked online.

The team at Custos also constantly scans the public web and dark web for protected content that could be leaked, and cultivates a community of “bounty hunters” that can find pirated content in the hard-to-reach corners of the internet, notifying us of infringements by claiming the cryptocurrency bounties embedded in the patented watermarks.

Deterring leaks is what the technology is intended to do. The fact that it adds tracking technology to each copy is meant to instil a credible threat of detection on any would-be pirate.

Decentralised detection is the final part of the puzzle that has been lacking to make social DRM effective. Without decentralised detection, global coverage is not possible. Without global coverage, there is no credible threat of detection.