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Warner goes to school on piracy - June 30, 2008

Last week, Warner Bros. reshuffled its anti-piracy operation, promoting studio veteran David P. Kaplan to the position of senior VP and intellectual property counsel, worldwide anti-piracy operations. In announcing the restructuring, the studio said the anti-piracy office would take on an expanded mission, including a new focus on revenue growth as well as revenue protection and piracy prevention. On Monday, Kaplan spoke with Media Wonk about the division’s new responsibilities.

“One of the things we’ve discovered over the past couple of years is that the tools for looking for piracy online have become much more sophisticated,” Kaplan said. “There’s a lot of information that can we can collect now, some of it concerning piracy, but also concerning online demand for particular content.”

According to Kaplan, Warner has begun collecting data on genres of pirated content, where in the world and the time of day it’s downloaded and viewed, the protocols used and various other parameters in an effort to understand the nature of online demand.

“We’ve always looked at piracy as a competitor,” Kaplan said. “What’s changed in the last year or two is the tools for collecting information about the competition have gotten better.”

Kaplan credited advances in content recognition technology (e.g. watermarks, digital fingerprinting) for the improved data collection.

“In the past those technologies were mostly used to trigger some sort of anti-piracy response, like filtering content, but they’ve gotten much more sophisticated,” he said.

Kaplan said his office has begun sharing the information it collects about unauthorized online use of Warner content with business executives at the studio charged with expanding the legitimate online market.

“For instance, we can go to executives charged with monetizing TV content and tell them the specific content that is generating the most demand, the genres or where certain shows are hot and where they’re not,” he said. “We might tell them, ‘you might want to get this show out in this particular country, either online or on DVD, because there’s a lot of interest there, but you might not even want to bother in this other country because there’s not enough demand.’”

How are his data received by the business-side folks?

“It’s early days, but no one has told me to get out of their office yet,” Kaplan said.
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