The past year has seen a number of major advances in the fight against the illegal market. Rights Alliance’s annual report provides an insight into this year’s work, successes and challenges.
As stated in Rights Alliance’s annual report for 2019, we have succeeded in achieving several important breakthroughs and successful blockades in the fight against the illegal market during the past year, which has effectively prevented the Danes’ use of illegal services.
Rights Alliance has among others things conducted a number of blocking cases, which were the first of their kind in Denmark, both in relation to illegal streaming of live sports, ‘stream ripping’ services, illegal copying and sharing of news articles and their associated image material as well as illegal copying and sharing of scientific articles .
However, the illegal market is changing rapidly, and parallel to the successes in 2019, we saw that there is an increasing decentralization of the market to social media such as Facebook and YouTube, with which illegal content is made available on legal platforms. These challenges have greatly underlined the importance of good cooperation with the platforms and the work on Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive on Platform Liability.
VPN and alternative DNS are gaining ground
Despite the increasing decentralization of illegal content to legal platforms, there is still a large number of Danish visitors to dedicated illegal services. In 2019, Danish users clicked on illegal services 146 million times, which is an average of 12 million times a month.
Although the use of illegal services has apparently decreased by as much as 40 percent from 2018, when Danes clicked 239 million times, the decrease unfortunately does not mean that fewer users use the illegal services.
As elaborated in Rights Alliance’s annual report, the proportion of Danish 15- to 74-year-olds who download, or stream films and series illegally is stable. This corresponds to approximately 450,000 Danes using illegal services every year. An explanation for the decreased number of visits, but stable number of users, we attribute, in part, to the effect of the blockades, but also an increased use of so-called VPN connections and the use of alternative DNS providers, which make it possible to bypass blockages, and which do not appear in traffic measurements for the services. Therefore, these technologies are also a focal point in the coming year’s work.
The resources have not kept pace with developments
The progress of Rights Alliance in the fight against the illegal market can be largely attributed to the fact that we have managed to develop and improve our competencies and tools as the illegal market has done the same.
But digital crime is becoming more complicated and is constantly evolving. It therefore requires resources and swift action to curb new, complex methods of distributing and sharing illegal content, and tools, competencies and financial support from the authorities are still needed.
Read the Rights Alliance’s annual report and get an in-depth insight into the past year’s work, successes and challenges, and get a status of and a deeper insight into what developments we see in the illegal market and the Danes’ use of it.