Apple joins motion picture industry anti-piracy group

Apple TV+ has joined the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a coalition of entertainment companies and streaming services seeking to stamp down internet piracy.

ACE was founded in 2017 by the Motion Pictures Association and 30 companies in the industry, and now includes members such as Netflix and Sony Pictures. At the time of its launch, it represented a novel partnership between legacy movie studios and streaming services.

Apple will join the group's governing board alongside Amazon, Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, and NBCUniversal, Variety reports. According to ACE Chairman Charles Rivkin, the governing board "determines the strategy and where to spend the budget" for the group's anti-piracy efforts.

ACE goes after illegal services that offer unlimited live TV and film content for a price that undercuts legitimate platforms. Those platforms often claim to have legitimate rights to pirated content.

The organization investigates both piracy platforms and sellers of hardware that can aid in it. It also files lawsuits, and in the past has notched significant wins against piracy platform operators. ACE says that 9 million households, and about 23 million individual users, subscribe to a pirate TV service.

"It's an ongoing fight but I'm really proud of the way ACE has been advancing and protecting content creators," Rivkin told Variety. "When you shut down these illegal sites what happens is it drives traffic to legitimate sites."

Apple's cooperation with the organization represents a growing bond between the company and legacy studios, and will likely draw Apple further into industry-wide efforts to crack down on pirated content.

10 Comments

linkman 1040 comments · 11 Years

About 4 years ago

This is good unless it results in another round of DRM attempts. DRM is simply a way to make consumers life difficult and has done little to reduce piracy. CableCard, DAT copy bit, Sony's rootkit, SecuROM, HDCP, DVD CSS -- this partial list has been nothing but trouble.

Beats 3073 comments · 4 Years

I could see anti-trust issues for Apple here. Everything should be free from them and they should distribute my home movies *wink *wink*.

linkman said:

This is good unless it results in another round of DRM attempts. DRM is simply a way to make consumers life difficult and has done little to reduce piracy. CableCard, DAT copy bit, Sony's rootkit, SecuROM, HDCP, DVD CSS -- this partial list has been nothing but trouble.

Piracy makes it hell for honest people sadly.

ihatescreennames 1971 comments · 19 Years

What is a “piracy platform operator”? Are they talking about torrenting sites?

The article states ACE has notched significant wins against some but no examples.

fastasleep 6451 comments · 14 Years

ihatescreennames said:

What is a “piracy platform operator”? Are they talking about torrenting sites?

The article states ACE has notched significant wins against some but no examples.

Torrent sites, various hardware providers, software providers — think Kodi add-ons, IPTV, Android APKs — things like PopcornTime and other services that offered streaming TV shows and shit.

https://torrentfreak.com/tag/alliance-for-creativity-and-entertainment/

svanstrom 685 comments · 7 Years

ihatescreennames said:

What is a “piracy platform operator”? Are they talking about torrenting sites?

The article states ACE has notched significant wins against some but no examples.

In short it means anything that they claim can be used to do something that in their books will make them lose a lot of money (because somehow they calculate every past, present, and future, download/view as a bluray not sold).

This is probably going to end up being a PITA at a later date.