How Can Streaming Publishers Predict Where Pirates Will Strike Next?
Curtailing streaming piracy can be a bit like a game of whack-a-mole, whether it’s anticipating where the leaking or leeching will come from on a premium live event, or predicting which content pirates are most likely to target. EZDRM Co-Founder Olga Kornienko has helped a broad swath of clients try to get in pirates’ heads and stay one or more steps ahead of their attacks, and in this discussion with Integration Therapy’s Rebecca Avery from December’s Streaming Media Connect 2025, she discusses pirate strategy and psychology as she’s observed it over the years and practical ways to make sense of it and use of it.
If They Like It, They’ll Leak It
Acknowledging Kornienko’s breadth of experience with piracy and the wide range of publishers whose privacy-prevention efforts EZDRM supports, Avery asks, “Is there any pattern that you're seeing across all of these different clients about what kind of content or what kind of content that pirates are going after?”
“Content is king. Whatever is popular at the moment or whatever people need." Kornienko explains, is the best predictor of where pirates will strike. "I was on a panel in March of 2020, and the conversation was around the fact that as the pandemic was setting in, everybody wanted to see the movie Contagion, because we were hypothetically going into this world. So that was the thing that was most pirated at that point in time."
As the pandemic dragged on, she continues, "when we started to see the reality of what was happening to us, people switched gears and decided to watch Harry Potter. That was super popular and super-pirated because of the fact that people just couldn't get access to it and they wanted to escape the land of Contagion. So I think it's a question of what people are trying to watch and what people are trying, what's popular."
In other cases it's less obvious why a particular piece of content would be stolen. "We've had customers contact us and say, 'Hey, we just found one of our educational videos on YouTube. How did it get there?' And then you start digging to see what could have happened, where it could have leaked from, and so on and so forth. And even though it's not content like a Super Bowl or a Lady Gaga concert, somebody out there just didn't want to pay the money for it, so they decided to figure out how to hack it and then it gets leaked. So I think it really doesn't matter. As long as somebody wants to watch it, they will try to leak it."
The Psychology of Casual Piracy
"You just need one bad actor, I guess," Avery says. "But as far as patterns, it's almost like you could hire a pirate psychologist to figure out where they're going to go depending on the world context."
"When we're talking about piracy in general, I think everybody has committed some version of casual piracy where we connected to a VPN to watch a piece of content that we technically shouldn't be watching because we're currently on a business trip in Singapore and we just can't get to our own content and things like that," Kornienko concedes. "Is that piracy because I'm going through a VPN? Absolutely. Do I technically have rights to watch it because I live in the US? Also true. So I think that kind of content is pirated as well. And I think that, like you said, as piracy psychologists, we need to figure out why people pirate. And off of that, either make the content available or figure out a commercial model that makes people less likely to pirate content and so on and so forth."
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