The for-profit theft of creative works jeopardizes the rights of all creative individuals, puts jobs at risks, and undermines new legal business models and distribution platforms.
For such reason, 3antS has the mission to revolutionize the protection of digital content developing tools by combining the intelligent analysis of internet data, while creating a connection between the consumers and the content industry (authors) to rise social awareness and empathy links to fight against piracy.
• Problem 1: The effects of Piracy in numbers
In the last ten years with the massive development of the Internet, piracy related business has grown to be a huge economic and cyber security problem, accounting for 24% of the global network traffic. Initially this was a problem related only to the media creative sectors: books, music, films, television, newspapers, software and videogames, but in the latest years - thanks to the revolution of e-commerce platforms - piracy effects touch also, other forms of content such as brands and designers (fashion, perfumes, watches, pharma, etc.)
Cultural & Creative industries generates $2,250 billions of revenues annually and supports more than 29,5 million of jobs to the worldwide economy , while retail B2C sales in 2018 sales worldwide account with $3,051,15 billions. Only media content piracy is believed to have cost the five largest EU economies around $25billions and more than189,600 jobs between 2008 and 2011. If including other types of piracy and counterfeiting the statistic rise till $125 billions of loses and more than 2.5 million of jobs .
Since 2006, the number of films released each year by the major film companies have dropped by 37%, from 204 movies released in 2006 to just 128 released in 2012. As said before, this fraud is not only affecting the media sector but also involving the pharma, cosmetic, fashion industries, among others. One of four e-commerce transactions involve fraud products, as 10% of the global commerce is based on illegal pirate goods. Product counterfeiting value accounts for 600.000 million euros globally.
• Problem 2: The consumer insensitivity towards Piracy
In recent years’ bandwidth consumed by media pirates has grown 160%, which means that the 22% of all global internet bandwidth is used for online piracy purposes. More than 432 million of internet users regularly pirate content within three key regions: North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific make up a majority of the internet world, comprising 82.6% of all internet users. But, what it is more worrying, is that the 70% of online users do not find nothing wrong in online piracy and so the pirated content receives more than 53 billion of visits per year. For instance, over 10 million people worldwide have pirated “Expendables 3”, which was leaked online weeks before its release, causing a revenue loss of up to $250 million. Also, facts show that, more than 42% of software running worldwide is illegal, and that at least the 95% of music downloaded online is pirated.
• Problem 3: Where the money goes
Piracy is extremely harmful to the cultural, creative, retail industries & brands: it wrecks distribution channels and leaves creators, creative industries and designers unrewarded or ill-rewarded. Besides, piracy-focused sites are owned and run for profit and so losses from the industry are transformed to revenues for those individuals that are not the original, authors or authorised distributors. The ecosystems of the internet commonly used to obtain infringing media material are bittorrent, video streaming, cyberlockers, and other file sharing networks, while for brands and consumers’ goods are, massive e-commerce platforms as ali-express, Alibaba etc.,
The economic harm from piracy is large and demonstrable, but also the power of these hackers and product pirates are growing with the increasing revenues and revolution of the digital sector, becoming now a major cyber security challenge worldwide. For instance, the famous case of the film “The Interview” and the SONY hacking, in which hackers did not only steal the referred film and company data, but also the titles that where disseminated causing losses of $1,4 billions and jobs cuts.
3ANTS aims to become the main reference cyber-security service framework to fight against contents piracy & digital distribution of counterfeited goods. With that purpose, 3ANTS mission is to deliver a set of breakthrough cybersecurity SaaS services built over a disruptive self-developed algorithm based on machine learning techniques, that follows as a crawler pirated content & goods through the internet (web, torrents, mobile applications, social networks, e-commerce etc.) automatically geo-locating (100% of accuracy) the items and forcing their withdrawal (98%)
