As for 2020 according to the Global Innovation Policy Center worldwide online piracy costs the U.S. economy between $29.9 billion and $71 billion in lost revenue each year. The Global Web is one of the most popular ways of illegal content distribution. Streaming sites, cyberlockers, P2P sites, link sites, and torrent sites – these are channels people use in order to upload and download infringements. What should copyright holders do to stay back their rights?

The dramatic change in this fight against online-piracy was made with the development of digital fingerprinting technology. A video search engine based on digital video fingerprinting enables it to rapidly identify all copies of a video file, regardless of the language, video quality, and minor distortions. A special software – WebScan – identifies copies of a video based on a digital video fingerprint. This technology currently works on the six major video-sharing platforms which do not have inbuilt video pre-filtering systems. The principle of automatic video identification is similar to that of YouTube Content ID. The entire technology behind WebScan is proprietary and is developed by WebKontrol engineers.

Once the Rightsholder uploads FPs created from her Multimedia Library to WebScan, the search can be made. Rightsholders may choose desired titles and platforms. WebScan will automatically compare Rightsholders’ FPs to the Platforms FP database of each platform and return the list of detected copies.

Why Webscan? First of all, search can be made for thousands of titles of media content simultaneously and search results are returned in a matter of minutes. No valuable time is wasted, the copied videos can be detected before they grow their audience. Also all copies are detected based on video content, regardless of the file’s name on a platform. This enables WebScan to perform an in-depth search and identify purposefully misnamed files, such as “123” etc. WebScan thus typically detects a significantly larger number of illegal copies on covered platforms, including those with installed Content ID. No need for extensive teams of analysts, an anti-piracy professional can manage large amounts of content simultaneously. No need to input keywords or speak the local language.