What Types of Sites Have the Most of Piracy?

The piracy landscape is diverse. Winning anti-piracy strategy always takes into account the variety of resources involved in the distribution of content that infringes intellectual property rights and includes specific measures that have to be applied in relation to each of them. Profound understanding of types of sites is a must-have to start building an effective content protection strategy.

Cheat Sheet for Types of Sites with Pirated Content

User-generated content (UGC) site

UGC sites include social media platforms and video hosting sites. Combined, they have the biggest audiences globally and usually rank at the very top in monthly internet traffic attracted in every country. On such sites, users can upload any files for public access, without any limits. They also can browse the content via a built-in site search.

Meanwhile, only a few platforms provide copyright protection tools for immediate detection and takedown of pirated content, all UGC sites comply with copyright laws and remove illegal files upon receiving a claim.

Examples: YouTube, Facebook, Dailymotion, Vimeo, VK.com, and others.

Cyberlockers or sites with direct download links (DDL)

Cyberlockers are third-party file-hosting services created for storing and sharing various types of media files and data. They operate as cloud storage enabling fast and easy access to hosted files from any part of the planet. Files are available via direct link only.

Many cyberlocker sites are legit platforms that are fully-compliant with take-down requests. However, some of them were set up for the distribution of violating content and so are not responsive to copyright claims.

Examples: Google Drive, Yandex Disk, Mega.nz, Uptobox.com, and others.

Online streaming sites

Online streaming resources allow users to consume Live or VOD content on-site. In many cases, such websites do not host illegal content themselves but embed it from outside video hosting sites or cyberlockers. In a few cases, the content is stored on sites’ servers. Sites’ responsiveness to copyright claims may differ.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) or BitTorrent sites

Historically P2P technologies-based sites were the very first sources of online piracy. Such platforms use BitTorrent clients software and .torrent files to create a one-to-many connection leveraging a tracker server for file sharing. Sites' compliance may differ.

Link sites

Link sites collect and make available links with pirated content that cannot be directly found on file-hosting sites. Such resources operate as a convenient content searching tool.