NEM to address piracy in Central and Eastern Europe

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The growing problem of piracy in Central and Eastern Europe will be the subject of a panel discussion at NEM 2018 in Dubrovnik.

According to a 2016 report produced by MUSO, based on an analysis of the global traffic of 14,000 of the largest piracy websites, Croatia is the fourth country in the world in terms of downloading content illegally. Latvia, Bulgaria and Lithuania occupy the top three positions, with Spain, Greece and Serbia immediately below Croatia. Chris Anderson, the head of film and TV services at MUSO and a panellist at NEM 2018, has said that visits to piracy sites are up 3.4% from 2016. He claims that with the recent proliferation of VOD subscription services many expected demand for illegitimate content to have significantly dropped, but this is not the case.

According to Anderson, “The vast majority of visits were made via web-streaming sites (96.1%), with access via mobile devices (51.92%) rising up the ranks to become the most popular way of consuming illegitimate content, and towards the end of 2017, torrent-based television piracy had a resurgence”.

Yet laws are not there to be broken. In Germany, for instance, only 1.71% of the internet population uses pirated digital content. If you download content illegally in Germany, you can be fined with € 900-2000 per TV show or movie.

On the other hand, in Croatia operators do not have the authority to check the illegal downloading of digital content from the internet since they have no access to that content. This is possible only with a warrant issued by a court.

The NEM 2018 panel Fighting pirates in the CEE region will be moderated by Marijana Vukasinovic, head of content management at Telekom Srbija. As well as Chris Anderson, the panellists will include Damir Hajduk, chairman of the Agency for Electronic Media, Irena Battelino, head of content acquisition and media marketing services at Telekom Slovenije and Mark Mulready, VP of cybersecurity services at Irdeto.

NEM 2018 will take place in Dubrovnik, Croatia from June 11-14.