61 SPORTS FOCUS Content Piracy
THE PIRATE HUNTER Inspector Marlene Álvarez Vicente works for the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía (Spanish National Police) in the Grupo de Antipirateria (Central Cybercrime Unit or CCU). Last year, her team won the first Anti-Piracy Award at the Europol Intellectual Property Crime Conference for bringing down a number of illegal streaming operations. The CCU is part of Criminal Investigations Headquarters and investigates cybercrimes at a national and international level. The team are also in charge of contributing their expertise to conferences on cybercrime, training and aiding international investigations.
deployed, only to be hacked by clever developers now employed by pirates. Illegal set-top boxes are just one massive money-spinner. The Saudi Arabia- based pirate pay television broadcaster beoutQ has openly mocked international copyright laws through the wholesale theft of content by Qatari sports network beIN. Reports last year from digital security experts showed Saudi satellite company Arabsat is also involved in the ongoing beoutQ scandal. The Saudi government claims to have confiscated thousands of beoutQ set-top boxes last year, but the jury is out on whether or not the government itself has been complicit in the pirating of content.
The CCU is composed of three central divisions, each a specialist in the different modalities of cybercrime, such as cyberattacks or child sexual exploitation on the internet. Vincente’s Anti-Piracy Group operates as part of the Cybersecurity Operations Division and is charge of investigating crimes against intellectual property rights (website likes, IPTV, card sharing, software piracy and fake products) committed on the internet or new technologies. “We start an investigation when I receive a complaint. This could be in reference to a website, an illegal provider or piracy via IPTV,” explains Álvarez Vicente. “We do an investigation from three angles: technical, economic and traditional. This is the best way to identify the people involved and calculate the economic profits, because profits are the goal in that cybercrime modality.” Our present digital infrastructure means that almost every type of content is up for piracy – books, films, music, software – but Vicente notes that Spain is seeing a particular increase in illegal content distribution through IPTV.
ORGANISED CRIME IS ESPECIALLY INVOLVED IN IPTV PIRACY AND THEMONEY GOES TO TAX HAVENS IN ORDER TO HIDE THE CRIMINAL ACTIVITY
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