Content and copyright

Piracy and unauthorised distribution.

Somebody is distributing your work and keeping the money, or giving it away and costing you the sale. The copies are perfect because they are yours. What separates a problem that can be dealt with from one that cannot is rarely the law. It is whether the operation behind it can be reached.

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What this looks like when it goes wrong

The straightforward version is a paid product being resold by somebody who never made it. A course, a report, a film, a sample library, software, a template set or a book, listed at a fraction of the price on a marketplace, a forum, a file host or a messaging channel. They are running a business on your inventory.

The second is a leak from inside the chain. Pre release material, a review copy, a festival screener, a private preview, a file sent to a partner who was entitled to have it. The failure is not a stranger breaking in. It is a permission that was granted properly and then abused, and the damage is worst when the release has not happened yet.

The third is a paid service being consumed by people who are not paying for it. Credentials shared far beyond what was licensed, subscription material mirrored on a site carrying advertising, or a stream restarted somewhere else for an audience that would otherwise have bought access. The material is not being sold in the ordinary sense. It is being monetised in a way you see nothing from.

The fourth is the version people find most demoralising. Removal works, and it changes nothing. The listing comes down and reappears within hours under a different account, a different host or a different name. Each individual step succeeds. The operation is untouched, because nothing that has been done so far has reached the person running it or the money going into it.

What actually decides it

The first question is what you hold and whether it lets you act. Owning the copyright is one position, holding it under a licence is another, and whether a licensee can act in its own name depends on the kind of licence and on its terms. Where a work has several rightholders, or where the recording and the underlying work sit with different people, the party best placed to act may not be the party that noticed the problem.

The second is whether the person behind it can be identified. A takedown removes a listing. A name and an address is what turns the problem into something that can be demanded, negotiated or sued over, and without one there is nothing to escalate to. Establishing who is actually operating an anonymous seller account or an offshore site is a large part of the work, and it is not something we describe.

The third is economics rather than law. Casual sharing between individuals is different from a business, and a business leaves a commercial footprint: hosting, a domain, payment routes, advertising relationships, affiliates, customer support. Those are pressure points that do not require a court, and cutting off the money is frequently faster and more damaging to the operation than any correspondence.

The fourth is where everybody sits. Enforcement is territorial, and an operator, a host, a payment route and the buyers can be in four different places with four different answers. Infringement on a commercial scale is also capable of engaging criminal as well as civil consequences, and there are routes for referring it, but which of those is realistically available depends on the facts and on the location of the people involved. It is better to decide the route at the start than to discover halfway through that the one being used cannot finish the job.

What we do

Establish who can enforce

What you hold, what any licence permits, and which rightholder is best placed to act.

Removal at volume

A sustained programme across marketplaces, hosts and platforms rather than one notice at a time.

Identify who is behind it

Turning an anonymous seller or operator into a person or company that can be written to, lawfully obtained.

Cut off the supporting services

Hosting, payment routes, domains and advertising, where those are what keep the operation running.

Trace a leak to its origin

Where pre release or restricted material escaped from inside a distribution chain, establishing where the failure was.

Escalate properly

Formal steps and proceedings where the operation is commercial, with regulated partners where a step requires them.

When to spend nothing

Pursuing individuals is almost always a bad trade. A person who shared a file with a friend is not the reason the numbers are down, the recovery is negligible, and enforcement aimed at your own audience causes damage that lasts longer than the infringement did. The targets worth money and attention are the ones selling, the ones operating at volume, and the ones who have built something that looks like a business, because those are the ones where a result changes the picture.

It is also worth being honest about the unreachable. Where an operator, the hosting and the money are all somewhere that no realistic step reaches, the achievable outcome is containment rather than victory: keep it off the mainstream platforms where your buyers actually are, and stop paying for anything beyond that. And where a product is easy to copy and inconvenient to buy, part of the leak is commercial rather than legal, and the cheapest fixes are not the legal ones.