A few weeks ago in Alicante, the EUIPO Conference on Copyright brought together Europe’s leading voices in policy, law, and the creative industries to address a growing concern: the widening gap between how piracy operates and how it is regulated.
Much of the discussion focused on the pressures facing rights‑holders and the widening gap between technological change and regulatory pace.
Verimatrix Product Director Maria (Mascha) Malinkowitsch attended the event and later shared her reflections in a recorded conversation with Mike McKeown, Director of Sales Enablement and AI Transformation at Verimatrix. The full interview can be viewed here.
Her perspective coming out of the conference was clear. While the industry is optimistic about innovation and the future of creative work, piracy has already evolved into something far more organized and technically sophisticated than most policy frameworks can accommodate. Technology, not legislation alone, will shape the outcomes for streaming platforms in the years ahead.
The collapse of enforcement
For years, takedown notices were seen as an essential weapon against piracy. They still matter, but their effectiveness has eroded to the point of near irrelevance. According to Malinkowitsch, only around 9% of the takedown requests now achieve their goal. The overwhelming majority fall into a void of non-compliant intermediaries, offshore hosting, or providers who simply ignore EU directives.
Pirates know this. They have adapted their infrastructure accordingly, and the result is a global network designed from the ground up to avoid enforcement. Even as major platforms like YouTube and Facebook improve automated takedowns, professional pirates have already moved on.
Industrial piracy and the CDN problem
The old model of piracy is fading. Torrents and hobbyist re-streams have given way to something far more organized. Illegal IPTV services have matured into fully-blown operations with revenue models, support channels, and marketing budgets.
The most damaging trend is what Mascha describes as CDN leeching. Instead of capturing a stream from a compromised device, pirates steal the keys from unsecured applications and impersonate legitimate users. They then pull content directly from the CDN, leaving the operator to pay for the bandwidth that fuels the pirate’s business. In some cases, it is the legitimate platform that ends up subsidizing the theft of its own content.
It is a quietly devastating shift. If operators cannot trust the devices asking for their streams, nothing else in the chain can truly be secured.
Why legislation cannot keep pace
None of this is helped by the slow evolvement of regulation. The conference made clear just how many competing interests have to be balanced across the EU’s member states. Even well-intentioned reforms are complicated by geopolitical considerations, the involvement of global platforms, and the sheer complexity of copyright in a digital world.
The result is not negligence but reality. Law will continue to evolve, but it cannot react at the speed needed to protect streaming businesses today. Platforms must assume responsibility for their own defenses.
Rethinking content protection
If the threat has changed, the strategy has to change with it. The industry’s traditional assumption was simple. Deliver content to a trusted device, secure the stream, and rely on takedowns when leaks appear. That model no longer holds.
Modern content protection begins with recognizing the new threats presented by the new ecosystem. If you distribute through the web, your content protection mechanisms should also be supported by suitable cybersecurity measures. Concretely: securing your video applications. Every subscriber brings their own device, and every device presents a different mix of operating systems, browsers, and attack surfaces. Mascha is blunt about the implication. If the application itself is not secure, nothing downstream can be.
That means:
- Reliable identification of the device requesting the stream and seamless authentication that does not damage the user experience. Solid protection of the streaming app, with built-in mechanisms to defend itself against hacking attempts.
- Visibility into attacks, piracy risks, and misuse across the device base.
- Video-specific countermeasures on a per-device level and watermarking to track leaks.
Static protection is a myth. The only sustainable approach is one that can be refreshed often enough to force attackers back to square one. The magic word is “polymorphism,” built-in renewability, allowing you to renew protection easily at any point in time.
What a modern defense looks like
A practical response to today’s threats combines several layers. Strong application protection is the foundation. Device trust and behavioral monitoring narrow the attack surface. Persistent identification across apps and browsers prevents the impersonation that makes CDN leeching possible. And watermarking closes the circle by allowing platforms to identify the exact device behind any leak that still manages to sneak through the grates.
The real power comes when these layers are connected. Once a leak is detected, the device responsible can be isolated and shut down within seconds. This is a far more surgical and effective response than relying on providers who may never answer a takedown request. Also softer measures should be at hand: We all know how important it is to keep your subscribers happy.
Streamkeeper in practice
Mascha pointed out that the type of protection required today is not theoretical. Verimatrix Streamkeeper already brings these layers together in a practical, integrated way, linking application security, device trust, and content protection so each reinforces the others. The aim is not to bolt on more tools but to create the conditions in which attackers find it harder to operate and easier to detect.
A central part of that is multi-DRM, which remains essential for controlling access to premium content, but only when paired with stronger measures. Verimatrix Counterspy , the application protection technology she discussed in detail, adds anti-tampering, anti-debugging, and behavioral monitoring across both native apps and HTML5 environments, and it provides the persistent device identification needed to prevent impersonation. Trust Tunnel extends this further by ensuring that only legitimate, secured applications can request licenses, blocking the paths pirates rely on when attempting to pull content directly from the CDN.
Watermarking forms the final layer, tied to automated workflows rather than manual takedowns. As Mascha explained, being able to identify the exact device behind a leak allows operators to act within seconds instead of hoping a provider responds. It is a measured, targeted approach that reflects how piracy now operates and offers streamers a practical way to stay ahead.
The role of AI
AI surfaced frequently during the conference, though much of the discussion centered on training data and authorship. Malinkowitsch sees a wider field. AI now helps attackers discover tools, bypass restrictions, and reverse engineer weak protection. It can de-obfuscate code, locate leaked keys, and guide less experienced pirates towards methods that once required far more skill.
Yet AI also strengthens defensive capability. At Verimatrix it speeds up watermark extraction, improves operational insight, and powers tools like the Streamkeeper Assistant that help customers configure and troubleshoot protection in their own language. As with so much in technology, intention matters. The same capability that can undermine security can also reinforce it.
A call to action for streamers
The message from Alicante was not bleak, but it was blunt. Waiting for legislation to solve the problem is no longer an option. Piracy has become faster, cheaper, and more organized than ever, and the economics of streaming leave little room for complacency.
The platforms that succeed will be those that treat application security and device trust as central to their content protection strategy. The technology exists today, and the operators who embrace it will limit their exposure, preserve their revenue, and protect the experience their customers expect.
Piracy is evolving.
The defense against it has to evolve even faster.
