Pirate TV-streaming sites, where people can illegally watch popular content for free, continue to be such a big problem that the Korean government has decided to fight back by developing its own artificial intelligence to ban and automatically detect new dodgy websites.
Despite police crackdowns in multiple countries, online piracy continues to weigh heavily on the global TV and movie industry.
The Motion Picture Association (MPA), which also represents Netflix, told the US government last year that it estimates that piracy costs the US economy at least $29.2bn (£23bn) annually, and globally the whole industry lost $99.7bn (£78 bn) in 2021.
Following a long battle to block a hugely popular pirate streaming site called Noonoo TV, Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT announced earlier this week that it is now going to develop its own artificial intelligence that can automatically block new instances of the website several times a day.
The government agency said that it had worked together with Korean broadcasters and internet service providers to keep blocking Noonoo TV once a week, then twice a week, and finally once a day.
However, Noonoo TV kept coming back using different domain names. But even though the pirates were winning, after several weeks of battling to stay online, the site administrator got fed up with having to pay “outrageous” costs of bandwidth and shut the site down in April, piracy technology news site TorrentFreak reports.
The authorities probably thought they had finally won but, in the past two weeks, fans of the original site have created a brand new version of Noonoo TV with no association to the original. The Korean government is understandably annoyed and its communications regulator has called for stronger blocking measures.
“Currently, illegal site-detection response is manual work based on human manpower. As such, to overcome limitations, we are also planning to develop AI as a secondary technology to automatically detect new and replacement illegal site URLs,” Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT said in a statement.
“Online video service (OTT) content is a precious asset created with the blood of many people, made of sweat, valuable property, and is the growth engine responsible for the future of Korea. More than anything, it is important for citizens to refrain from using these illegal sites.”
While the government agency has not elaborated on how or when its new AI system will be deployed, TorrentFreak also reports that for now, the people running the second version of the Noonoo TV website are having a rethink.
The site’s operators posted on the website: “After careful consideration, The Noonoo TV Season 2 site is closed. It’s a short period, but I sincerely appreciate your interest. There is no plan to open Season 3, and please be aware of similar impersonation sites.”
While it is not to do with online piracy, in the past 12 months, Netflix has turned to tackle its other key problem — account and password sharing with people who are not in your household.
Following trials for 100 million households in South America in 2022, Netflix decided to launch new limits and sharing fees worldwide earlier this year, which finally came to the UK and US last month.
