The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

MUMBAI-BASED ANTI-PIRACY expert Mayur Kachare, who is the founder and CEO of Pirates Alert which works with private companies and the government, has often seen suburban train passengers hooked to their phones, watching even new movies on WhatsApp, the messaging platform. Most often, the quality of such videos, be it on Telegram or those numerous rogue sites, is excellent, he avers, emphasising that it is this scourge that he and others are waging a war against. “It is a tough job but rogue websites and apps can be tracked down using advanced proprietary technologies and forced to take down content.”

Big players have made a name for themselves in this crusade, which is also a business that helps producers of movies recover their costs and earn profits. In the process, these agencies that scour the web make hay, too, but only thanks to improvisation and hard work, leaving a trail of victims who flee to new pastures and come up with dirtier tricks as though they are engaged in a forever war. In India, the prominent firms tackling movie piracy both from the­atres and OTT sites include Aiplex, Block X, and Markscan.

Top executives of these agencies that Open spoke to concede that the task at hand is challenging, to say the least. After all, the ‘Rob Report’ released by Ernst & Young and the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) estimated the size of India’s piracy economy at ₹22,400 crore in 2023 which it says is steadily rising, eating into the profits of big studios and movie producers besides often bankrupting smaller filmmakers. A finding in the report reveals what exactly fuels the hydra-like persistence of the menace: at least 51 per cent of those who watch movies in India watch pirated content. No wonder then that pirated versions of Ajith-starrer Good Bad Ugly and Salman Khan’s Sikandar were available as soon as they were released recently.

Hackers manage to download content from OTT platforms and others record entire films from inside theatre halls before sharing on websites, social media or messaging apps—or all of them. The trouble is, as Kachare notes, they hop from one internet domain address to another, changing colour like a chameleon.

Shiva Dharma, founder and CEO of Chennai-based Block X, was part of the entertainment industry before making it big in the anti-piracy field. He saw piracy as a curse that snatched away the fruits of artistic labour—that was when he came across the idea of “building a barrier” for this online crime.

Agencies like Block X and others develop their own software and then collaborate with behemoths like Google, WhatsApp, YouTube, Daily Motion, X, and various social media platforms besides Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to hunt down channels and accounts that offer pirated movie content, especially in the first weeks after the release of a movie.

A day in the life of Dharma and his team, especially following new film releases, involves not only web crawling—on Google, Meta, YouTube, etc—but also joining various groups on Telegram and similar sites waiting for someone to share the content. On different platforms, they work in different ways. They work with dedicated moderators on some online platforms to delete accounts that advertise the release of movies on their sites as soon as a film releases. On a search engine like Google, wrongdoers can be made ‘invisible’. “Because the content isn’t managed by Google, their primary action is to deindex websites we report. The ongo­ing issue is that pirate sites will circumvent this by adopting new top-level domains [such as .soy, .diet, .ah, and others]. Despite this, Google possesses the technical ability to implement a complete block or choose not to index particular websites, irrespective of their chosen top-level domain [the final part of a website’s domain name],” says Dharma.

TikTok, on the other hand, can and does cooperate with requests to take down pirated content overseas. Piracy on Telegram is a tough nut to crack because it requires infiltrating channels and then warning admins to take down the content. “While it takes barely three minutes to take down content on YouTube, it takes us six to seven hours to make that happen on Telegram,” Dharma points out, adding that agencies like theirs are authorised by YouTube, Dailymotion, and some other sites to delete pirated movie content. “They give us access,” he says.

Monitoring alone isn’t a mark of success either; enforcing has to be done too. Although players like Block X and others are in constant touch with social media platforms and tech companies to report piracy, the biggest hurdle is in targeting offshore servers (servers based out of countries that have flexible local rules). In such cases, the fight has to be taken to local courts, notwithstanding pro­tection guarantees by the TRIPS agreement (a global legal agree­ment between all the member nations of the World Trade Organi­zation) and the Berne Convention, besides others. If the servers are based in countries like the Netherlands, Seychelles, Luxembourg, France, and other countries, the fight becomes time-consuming.

In the case of theatrical piracy, which is done from cinema halls, these agencies work hand-in-hand with companies like Qube Cine­ma Technologies and UFO Moviez to find out the source or the audi­torium where the piracy was first committed. They also collaborate with the Producer Council alerting theatre owners to implement necessary security measures and encouraging producers to initiate legal action if they are willing. It is the consequences of legal action after the exact IP address of the source of piracy is identified that scares piracy sites. This option was made possible after the so-called “John Doe order”—court orders against infringing on intellectual property rights, which in India is also called the Ashok Kumar order. Some of the notorious ones are Tamil Blasters, Tamil CV, etc, which offer a raft of movies across languages, making Tamil Nadu a hub of movie piracy in the whole country. Cinevood and iBomma are similar sites. Such websites often thrive on ad revenues mostly from betting sites and offer free videos..

NEWER THREATS KEEP emerging at a fast clip. Sample this announcement from StreamFab, a video-downloading app: “A popular all-in-one streaming video downloader that can remove digital rights management [DRM] protections and convert restricted content, so that you can unlock restricted media and enjoy it freely on your devices without limitations.”

Apps such as these are a boon for hackers who break DRM tools that protect content—the focus here being movies owned by OTT platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar, and others—from unsubscribed viewers and hackers.

A Mumbai-based former executive with Amazon Prime tells Open that there have been occasions when they could see a pirated version of a movie within three minutes of its release. DRM tools by companies such as Google, Microsoft, etc, form the backbone of the DRM systems of most OTT platforms that these apps help break and download content from—which is then passed on through messaging apps and placed on websites. Some hackers develop their own software to make it happen. The former Amazon Prime executive notes that OTT platforms are often wary of releases in certain geographies where hacking is more rampant.

Shady IPTV services are another major threat. While many le­gal ones function across the world, a number of them operating especially out of Canada and the US offer pirated content—from thousands of channels.

For instance, Tashan TV in North America offers 15,000-plus live channels and 100,000-plus HD movies. Most of the movie content is pirated. An Indian-American interested in watching movies on the date of the release of a film in India usually has to pay $30 per month for the services along with an IPTV box. The quality is HD-like, says a person residing in New York who adds that he won a month of free use by referring a friend from Philadelphia to the company, who also bought an IPTV box. Un­like a camrip, a copy of a movie recorded directly in a cinema, which is of low quality, a WebRip, a copy of a video captured from streaming platforms, is of high quality.

Although the rogue IPTV channel culture hasn’t flourished in India yet, what is a big concern for content providers is how easily videos offered for rent on OTT platforms are downloaded and pirated by hackers, says a Delhi-based executive with a video streaming company.

For their part, Block X shares with Open some of their own find­ings about online movie piracy. Between January 1 and April 15, 2025, Telegram accounted for infringement activity involving 34 South Indian movies, dominating with 38.9 per cent of the cases, they reveal. Cloud storage and file hosting platforms followed at 21.7 per cent; streaming sites made up 18.8 per cent; social me­dia accounted for 13.7 per cent, and peer-to-peer sharing stood at 6.6 per cent. “Other sources represented a minimal 0.3 per cent, highlighting how a few major platforms continue to drive the majority of piracy,” the agency said.

Various surveys have given us a peek into the problem, perhaps the tip of the ice­berg. Ankura Piracy Statistics Report 2022 placed India as the third-highest contribu­tor (after the US and Russia) of visits to con­tent piracy websites with over 7 billion vis­its through Torrent sites. Among the most pirated movies/series in India over the past years were Game of Thrones; Spiderman: No Way Home; The Batman; RRR; Pushpa, and so on. With phone internet penetration ris­ing rapidly, access to unauthorised movie content is spiking, and to fight it off, the government has implemented strict copy­right laws. But, as Ankura’s report states, high demand for free content and the ease of access have made things only worse.

Filmmaker and podcaster Hindol Hazra offers a contrarian take on the problem, al­though he has no doubts whatsoever that piracy has to be fought tooth and nail. In his chat with Open, he brings up the Streisand effect, which explains why the public is more curious when content is not easily avail­able. He believes that for most Indians, film viewing in theatres is not affordable because of high prices, especially in the cities. Meanwhile, a Mumbai-based filmmaker alleges that some producers deliberately leak content to drum up hype for the movie in connivance with rogue websites and ask them to take it down once the excitement builds up. He claims that piracy also happens from multiple stakeholders who handle movies, from production to post-production and distribution—although some others con­tend that it is easier said than done because systems are in place to check misuse and identify who caused the harm.

Film producer Anupama Bose, too, swears by youthful passion as a reason for piracy gaining momentum. She says a system of hybrid release of movies, especially small-budget films, is the way forward to combat piracy. Bose is of the view that the big-screen experience doesn’t have to lose out to OTT platforms—since they are entirely different experiences, they do not necessarily can­nibalise each other and result in financial loss. “We shouldn’t be scared of ‘hybrid’,” she says.

Her opinion has both detractors and supporters. At least two other filmmakers Open spoke to state that hybrid is a risky propo­sition, especially for big budget films, where profits of multiple stakeholders have to be taken care of. “They can’t live in uncertain­ty all the time. Empty seats are not good news,” one of them says.

However, Kanad Rishiraj, founder of MovieSaints, which pitch­es itself as an AI-powered tech company for movie distribution, says that hybrid is a worthy model for replication world­wide while fighting piracy alongside. A computer engineer by profession and based out of Philadelphia, he advocates experimentation with the concept to ride out the bad times. “Demand is extremely high still just as it was in the 1990s when people purchased DVDs of movies they would never watch otherwise.” While fighting piracy using advanced tools, his firm also offers other services such as worldwide online pay-per-view film dis­tribution, a platform for fundraising and crowdfunding for filmmakers, as well as an online venue for festivals and film clubs to do piracy-proof online film screenings.

Rishiraj, who was left blind in a freak accident before he finally regained eye­sight in one of his eyes, decided that he would build a company that offers views for filmmakers who would never be known otherwise. The way MovieSaints works, besides battling piracy, is by blocking online content in ar­eas where films are running in theatres. Folks like him are think­ing deeply about saving cinema from piracy while spreading the message about movies far wider than earlier.

Everybody agrees, though, that bootleg recording networks and smart hackers are on the prowl like never before. Specialised agencies are making a mark indeed, but much more is in order.

Ajithcopyright lawsGood Bad UglyInternet piracymoviesonlinepiracySalman KhanSikandarunauthorised movie