David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.
This time last year, I had the opportunity to talk to Dr. David Price of London-based NetNames shortly after they released a report on the scale and scope of media piracy worldwide. Presently, Dr. Price is in Washington DC where, along with collaborator Tom Galvin of the Digital Citizens Alliance, he officially released a new report on piracy, this one focused entirely on sites known as cyberlockers. Titled “Behind the Cyberlocker Door,” the report focuses on the top thirty sites that use this technology to facilitate and profit from the illegal distribution of copyrighted content like motion pictures, music, books, and video games. The report describes how these black-market businesses function, and how they earn their money. And among the more striking aspects of the study is the fact that Visa and Master Card, despite claims to the contrary, are facilitating transactions for these cyberlocker sites. Moreover, users of these sites may be surprised to learn that signing up for premium accounts to enable faster downloads could well expose them to malware designed to enable identity theft.
People like to tell themselves and others that piracy of entertainment media is a victimless crime, by which they typically mean that their one little download of a major motion picture doesn’t hurt anyone when the studio that produced said picture is making millions. I’ve assailed this fallacy in more than a few posts, but a report released today by London-based NetNames, in collaboration with the Digital Citizens Alliance, makes quite clear that if you’re a user of a pirate site, the most vulnerable victim in the transaction may well be you.
This time last year, Dr. David Price authored a report for NetNames called “Sizing the Piracy Universe,” which as the title implies, took a very broad look at the global piracy ecosystem. This new report “Behind the Cyberlocker Door” specifically examines the mechanics and finances of the top 30 cyberlocker sites, which are designed specifically to facilitate mass theft of copyrighted material. Fifteen of the sites were direct download sites, and fifteen were streaming sites, and all were found to be profitable enterprises deriving revenues from a combination of advertising and the sale of premium accounts, primarily process through Visa and MasterCard.
For readers who don’t know about cyberlockers, think of the system as a vastly more robust version of a legal cloud storage service like Dropbox designed to share a limited volume of files with family, friends, and business colleagues. These cyberlockers facilitate uploading and downloading of unlimited files worldwide among complete strangers, and the report states unsurprisingly that the majority of the content (roughly 80% not including pornography) found on these sites is comprised of illegally distributed copyrighted works — movies, music, books, and video games. The 30 sites studied earn collective annual profit of about $69 million.
These may not be compelling statistics to the staunch piracy advocate or even the casual piracy dabbler, who wants to convince himself that these enterprises are just a reaction to outdated scarcity caused by unreasonable copyright regimes and greedy producers. But just because Kim Dotcom, the founders of The Pirate Bay, and even Internet industry advocates like to make grandiose, ideological claims about piracy, people should not be fooled for a second that the owners of these sites are quite so high-minded as all that. In fact, parents of kids with unfettered access to computers ought to pay particular attention because these sites can be plain dangerous. Dr. Price’s report indicates that more than half of all cyberlocker sties are responsible for malware infections on computers. This is particularly worrisome as more and more consumers gravitate toward mobile devices, and the threat of identity theft through malware will likely become more acute. Mobile devices are typically less secure than home computers, and people are storing an increasing amount of personal and financial data on mobile devices through apps designed to make transactions and communications more convenient.
A typical way in which malware is introduced by a content-theft cyberlocker, one offering downloads of movies for instance, is to sell users premium accounts and/or third-party software to expedite downloads and playback of motion pictures. Not only do these sites charge for the service — and we’ll come back to that — but the process stepping users through sign-up and/or downloading player software is designed to mask the introduction of malware to a computer that can then be used for identity theft. The money made by advertising and selling premium accounts to infringing material is good money for these sites, but that business model is really just bait to attract users to these sites in order to exploit their data in some more substantial fashion. So, I know it’s terrible that content producers would ever presume to charge dirty dirty money for legal access to their works, but $3.99 to rent a movie seems like a way better deal than letting some hacker in Ukraine roam around in my personal data.
One might rationally ask why someone would pay $10/month for a premium account on one of these cyberlockers but refuse to pay $8 for an account with a legal distributor like Netflix. The answer will invariably come back that a Netflix or a Hulu, for instance, doesn’t have every film or TV show ever made whereas these sites that don’t enter into legal agreements with producers do have just about every title you can name. I suppose for some, that rationale is enough justification for doing harm to producers as well as risking their own data security, but the premium account phenomenon does give lie to all that nonsense calling copyright a form of “artificial scarcity.” I mean, what are the pirates doing offering slow downloads for free and fast downloads for a price other than “creating artificial scarcity” in their own black-market paradigm?
Quite simply, piracy is a business that exploits the labor of one segment of society in order to fleece another segment of society who think they’re getting away with something. And if that other segment is you and your data gets hacked, maybe all this pseudo-progressive talk about piracy as a social good will start to sound more like the hogwash it is.
Today, I live in a somewhat economically homogenous community, but back in the 1990s, when we still lived in the financial mosaic of Manhattan, I made a note in a journal somewhere that it seemed to me that people wanted to succeed in contemporary, technological society in order to win the reward of living more as organic beings separate from technology. Put another way, we live our lives and do our jobs by plugging into systems in order to earn the freedom to comfortably unplug from as many systems as we can. Why else do leisure-time pursuits so often involve dirt, water, sun, fresh foods, silence, conversation, and a general embargo on high-tech gadgets?
I was thinking about those days while reading an article int he NY Times by Nick Bilton titled Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent. Beginning with an anecdote about Jobs’s own kids not being allowed to use the iPad when it was first released, Bilton cites several examples of top executives in the computer tech industry who place some rather strict limits on their own children’s time spent with various devices. He wonders if these digital executives teaching analog values to their kids might “know something the rest of us don’t,” but I’m not sure that’s quite right. It is tempting, of course, to calls these tech-industry parents hypocrites for selling their wares to our children while sheltering their own, but I suspect that many of us know exactly what these parents know — that too much screen time is probably unhealthy. As such, I would not be surprised to learn that households headed by parents who work in the upper echelons of other industries are likewise rigorous about restricting iPads and such for their kids as well. I really think it’s about economics.
It should be stipulated here that post Boomer parents do have an apparently endless supply of theories about child raising. We Gen Xers knew two things as our firsts were born: 1) that we had a rapidly increasing wealth of information being made available to us; and 2) that our parents were unflinchingly wrong about everything. (It’s a wonder we lived, really.) Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of these converging phenomena is the conspiracy of parents who still refuse to vaccinate their children, literally bringing hideous diseases back from extinction, thus representing one of the greatest failures of the so-called information revolution. Certainly, the data are less clear regarding the effects of tech toys on children than, say, pertussis; yet I haven’t encountered too many parents who don’t at least make conscious choices, pro or con, with regard to how much screen time they feel is too much.
Back to economics, though, let’s face it — a contemporary middle-class household is a hectic environment, consistently pressured by the reality that many of life’s basic needs (e.g. medical care) continue to rise in cost outpacing our ability to earn. Add a couple of kids and their divergent, asymmetrical, and at times unreasonable, demands and we rely increasingly on own devices to achieve that elusive work/life balance they keep talking about in the magazines. The balance, of course, is the tricky part, isn’t it?
After all, it’s good news/bad news that we can read a client’s email during dinner that got off to a late start because somebody had martial arts practice; but if you are in fact the client (or boss) in that equation, you are unquestionably freer to ignore that email and engage in conversation with your kids just like low-tech Steve Jobs reportedly did. In turn, the parents’ freedom to unplug models the behavior they want to instill in the child for whom they have set related limits. But in the frenetic, middle-class household today, patterns or rituals can be very difficult to maintain, and all of our many “helpful” devices and their apps are not designed in any way to complement human rhythms or cycles; they much prefer us multi-tasking, always on, and a bit jittery. At what point we become extensions of the technology rather than the other way around is an ontological question I won’t attempt to answer.
So, do these tech-industry parents mentioned in Bilton’s article imply a measure of responsibility on the part of manufacturers? Should we expect Apple to provide warning labels on iPads? Caution: Extended time playing Minecraft may make your child a pain in the ass at home and a lousy student. We probably shouldn’t hold our collective breath for that one or anything like it; and I don’t personally think it is the makers of these technologies who bear that responsibility any more than heavy metal bands are responsible for anti-social behavior in teens. Nevertheless, these digital tools/toys are unquestionably having both positive and negative effects on kids, and the most important feature for parents, regardless of the promises in every new release, will probably still be the Off button.
The Illusion of More is my personal blog from December 2011 to December 2025. As of February 2026, I am no longer posting new blogs or other content, but I hope you enjoy this archive. Please do not attribute any of my writings here to my current or previous employers.
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