Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content

Embed­ded in the cere­bral cor­tex of any­one who watched a DVD between 2004 and 2008, is the same core mem­o­ry: watch­ing the You Wouldn’t Steal a Car advert.

It lasts just 48 sec­onds. Anx­i­ety-induc­ing elec­tro kicks in as a girl, sit­ting in front of a desk­top com­put­er, down­loads a film on a web­site that looks like Tele­text. The cam­era lurch­es and the tagline, stylised in a ran­som type­face, flies in: ​“YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR.”

Cue a stock char­ac­ter crook nick­ing what looks to be a Saab. The last word then changes to ​“HAND­BAG” and ​“TELE­VI­SION” before we see the same usu­al sus­pect run­ning away with the goods. Final­ly, it gets to the crux: ​“YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A MOVIE” it accus­es, before warn­ing that: ​“DOWN­LOAD­ING PIRAT­ED FILMS IS ILLE­GAL.” The girl, con­vinced, can­cels her down­load. ​“PIRA­CY, IT’S A CRIME” flash­es up.

Gov­ern­ment cam­paigns have his­tor­i­cal­ly been very hit and miss, main­ly miss. This one, it turns out, was miles off, a wild swing that went wrong, an inflat­able tube man wield­ing a pool noo­dle against a grasshop­per. ​“It was like swat­ting a fly with a sledge­ham­mer. But total­ly miss­ing the fly and smash­ing good­will towards the music and film indus­tries,” says Dr Kate Whit­man, a research fel­low at Uni­ver­si­ty of Portsmouth and expert in pira­cy and how it makes us behave. Cre­at­ed by the Motion Pic­ture Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca and the Intel­lec­tu­al Prop­er­ty Office of Sin­ga­pore (a spokesper­son from FACT, who are often cred­it­ed, told Huck they were not involved) in 2004, it was includ­ed on count­less DVDs as an unskip­pable fea­ture.

The anal­o­gy was, of course, total­ly false: steal­ing a movie is not like steal­ing a car. ​“The com­par­i­son of down­load­ing a movie to steal­ing phys­i­cal objects like cars and hand­bags seemed rather extreme to many view­ers. This incon­gruity made it stand out and ripe for mock­ery. The repet­i­tive nature of the mes­sage on DVDs and in the­aters, paired with the dra­mat­ic music and footage, only added to this,” says Ernesto Van der Sar, founder of the pira­cy pub­li­ca­tion Tor­rent­F­reak. One meme cap­tures the fal­la­cy per­fect­ly: ​“Imag­ine your car gets stolen, but it’s still there in the morning.”

The advert also acti­vat­ed the ​“social proof” lever by show­ing how nor­mal the behav­iour is. If it’s per­va­sive enough to war­rant a (sur­pris­ing­ly) big-bud­get advert, then it’s a social norm and there­fore you’re not a social out­sider for ille­gal­ly down­load­ing a film. ​“It’s such a core mem­o­ry and so icon­ic. It did­n’t work because they just made it look so cool. They high­light­ed how easy it is to steal a movie,” says Lau­ra, a 25-year-old Lon­don-based free­lance writer who reg­u­lar­ly pirates.

It rapid­ly reached pas­tiche sta­tus, lead­ing to memes, par­o­dies and even stick-and-poke tat­toos. And, in fact, the You Would­n’t Steal a Car ad may have actu­al­ly increased pira­cy rates.

Mil­lions of us in the UK, like Lau­ra, are still steal­ing movies 20 years on. Pira­cy has nev­er been more rife and, now, it’s main­ly through ille­gal stream­ing, which increased by 38.6% between 2021 and 2022. Accord­ing to esti­mates from the IPO, online copy­right infringe­ment – which includes pira­cy – costs the UK econ­o­my £9bn and cre­ates 80,500 job loss­es each year. It’s big busi­ness for the pirate sites, too. Accord­ing to an op-ed from New Dig­i­tal Age, each of the UK’s top ten most-vis­it­ed pirate web­sites is mak­ing £20m a year from advertising.

The image of pira­cy has, of course, dras­ti­cal­ly changed. Online pira­cy began in the 1980s, when dial-up modems (remem­ber the noise?) led to ​‘warez’ groups that dis­trib­uted files. Nap­ster, launched in 1999 and swift­ly fol­lowed by Limewire, saw MP3s trad­ed between ear­ly pirates. Soon after, the likes of Pirate Bay (drama­tised in a Swedish TV show of the same name this year) and Megau­pload (start­ed by noto­ri­ous inter­net over­lord Kim Dot­com) dis­trib­uted files across the globe. But phys­i­cal pira­cy was still far more pop­u­lar. In the ear­ly 2000s, it was stan­dard prac­tice in the UK to buy a stack of pirate DVDs at your local pub or mar­ket from your neigh­bour­hood huckster.

FACT esti­mat­ed that 3 mil­lion DVDs would be con­fis­cat­ed in 2004 – but that rep­re­sent­ed just 5% of the total in the UK. In 2006, the largest pirate DVD fac­to­ry in the UK was closed down, capa­ble of pro­duc­ing 60,000 discs a day. Law enforce­ment not­ed that it was churn­ing out every­thing from Ice Age 2 to bes­tial­i­ty pornos. Film down­load­ing began to go main­stream around this time, though it was still very slow, with each flick tak­ing between 8 and 12 hours to down­load. The indus­try was rat­tled with the Motion Pic­ture Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca claim­ing it would fine view­ers with £16,300 per film. About the price of pop­corn these days, then.

Then, in 2007, Net­flix launched its stream­ing plat­form and, with an omi­nous tudum, the film indus­try was changed for­ev­er. A tor­rent of pirate stream­ing sites fol­lowed suit, using sim­i­lar tech­nol­o­gy and inter­faces but stacked with unli­censed copies of movies. Put­lock­er, launched in the UK in 2011, reg­is­tered 800,000 vis­i­tors a day after a year. In 2014, the police suc­cess­ful­ly closed down its orig­i­nal site but it has since start­ed a quick change act of dif­fer­ent domains, mov­ing from Ice­land to Viet­nam to Lux­em­bourg. A clone is still live under the domain “.llc” – iron­i­cal­ly stand­ing for ​“lim­it­ed lia­bil­i­ty com­pa­ny” – promis­ing an unri­valled selec­tion of movies and TV series with­out any sign-up.

A host of oth­er sites with strange URLs and dodgy ads exist in cor­ners of the inter­net, from Solar­movie to 123Movies. ​“I have used many a web­site through the years because they obvi­ous­ly tend to dis­ap­pear,” Lau­ra says. While the orig­i­nal ver­sions have shut down, their names have become de fac­to brands, con­tin­u­ing to haunt the web and the dreams of FACT offi­cials. This boun­ti­ful black mar­ket makes pira­cy an end­less game of whack-a-mole, where the ham­mer-wield­er, not the mole, is blind. It’s a Sisyphean task for the cyber police.

These new sites ren­der the You Wouldn’t Steal a Car extreme­ly anachro­nis­tic but one thing still rings true. Pira­cy is a crime. ​“Stream­ing, down­load­ing or shar­ing unau­tho­rised TV con­tent, film or sports con­tent is a crime,” states the FACT web­site. In fact, it’s now a more seri­ous offence. An amend­ment to the Copy­right, Designs and Patents Act 1988 ear­li­er this year saw the max­i­mum penal­ty for infring­ing copy­right online rise from two years to ten years.

That being said it’s almost impos­si­ble to catch any crim­i­nals. ​“Con­sumers knew they were like­ly to have bet­ter tech­ni­cal knowl­edge than the mak­ers of the advert, and would be unlike­ly to be caught. And that they would be unlike­ly to be pros­e­cut­ed if they were,” Dr. Whit­man says. The new amend­ment requires the pirate to be mak­ing mon­ey from their actions or caus­ing a loss to the owner. 

While thou­sands of peo­ple have been issued warn­ings, no one in the UK has ever been fined or pros­e­cut­ed for watch­ing an unau­tho­rised stream. ​“I don’t even use a VPN. The gov­ern­ment has­n’t even got the dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture to make a web­site that’s func­tion­al. How are they going to stop it?” Rhys, a Lon­don-based writer, says.

The crack­down is, anti-pira­cy advo­cates assure us, on. Pirate hunters reg­is­tered a sig­nif­i­cant vic­to­ry in August when a coali­tion led by Ace – com­posed of mem­bers from the likes of Net­flix, Apple TV+ and Walt Dis­ney – worked with Viet­namese police to shut down Fmovies. Labelled ​“the largest pirate stream­ing oper­a­tion in the world” with more than 6.7bn vis­its in a sin­gle year, it was a flag­ship win for the film industry.

A small win that pales into insignif­i­cance when look­ing at a dif­fer­ent black mar­ket that is cur­rent­ly win­ning the fight: boot­leg sport. ​“It’s cer­tain­ly an area of inter­est at the moment and a focus of my research. It’s expen­sive to con­sume legal­ly, but fans are very pas­sion­ate about it — which pro­vides a good mon­ey mak­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for pirates,” Dr. Whit­man says. A YouGov sur­vey last year found that 5.1 mil­lion adults in Eng­land, Scot­land and Wales pirat­ed sport last year. Rhys is part of the crew and uses Red­dit to find ille­gal streams. ​“I do watch sport – foot­ball in par­tic­u­lar – three or four times a week and I pirate all of that. It’s a piece of piss and the qual­i­ty is immaculate.”

Oth­ers are using a dodgy fire stick, a device that’s already become as wide­spread and wide­ly par­o­died in British cul­ture as the vape. Adverts on social media offer these plug-and-play stream­ing devices – usu­al­ly cracked ver­sions of the Ama­zon Fire Stick – that can access pirate stream­ing plat­forms like Kodi and show sport from across the globe. Police – work­ing with FACT and Sky TV – have closed 3,000 adverts on social media for ille­gal IPTV ser­vices. A few rogue pirates have been made an exam­ple of; in May 2023, five peo­ple were jailed for more than 30 years for sell­ing sub­scrip­tions to ille­gal stream­ing net­works. But, for the most part, it’s a los­ing battle.

It’s not just films and sport that’s being pirat­ed. Pret­ty much any sort of con­tent is up for grabs. For cre­atives who can’t afford the Adobe Suite, there are cracked ver­sions offer­ing every piece of the slick­ly-designed soft­ware for free. And for book­worms with­out much paper to spare, there are online, all-you-can-read libraries. ​“Down­load­ing books is real­ly fuelling my love of read­ing. My whole life, I would buy books from Water­stones but you spend £6.99 and might only read the first chap­ter and realise you don’t like it very much,” Lucy, a 28-year-old teacher from Lon­don, says.

Cut­ting costs is, of course, the main rea­son that peo­ple will always pirate. Stream­ing has stretched bud­gets; the aver­age Brit now pays out near­ly £500 a year on sub­scrip­tions, with cheap­er pric­ing plans on the likes of Net­flix and Ama­zon Prime fun­nelling adverts down our throats foie-gras style. ​“In this cost of liv­ing cri­sis I can’t afford to pay for stream­ing ser­vices. Rent­ing a movie legal­ly online is a real last resort for me,” Lau­ra says. To top it off, loads of movie stream­ing ser­vices don’t always have a wide selec­tion: Put­lock­er, for exam­ple, has far more films than Net­flix. Stream­ers giv­ing us less for our mon­ey makes pira­cy more alluring.

Sport, too, is a bank break­er. ​“It’s real­ly incon­ve­nient and very expen­sive to do it legit­i­mate­ly. In the UK, Pre­mier League games at 3pm on a Sat­ur­day aren’t tele­vised to get peo­ple to go to the sta­di­ums, but they’re always sold out and most peo­ple can’t afford them any­way. It would take about three or four dif­fer­ent sub­scrip­tions to be able to watch every sin­gle game your team plays,” Rhys says.

For oth­er pirates, it’s less about the mon­ey and more about the cul­ture. Pira­cy is, at its heart, an anti-cap­i­tal­ist, anar­chic move­ment. While some sites make mon­ey, oth­er file-shar­ers and serv­er-hosters do it to realise a cyber­net­ic utopia of open source con­tent. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant for mar­gin­alised com­mu­ni­ties. ​“There are so many coun­tries where for queer peo­ple, film is only acces­si­ble through VPN or pira­cy. They deserve to have out­lets where they can enjoy cin­e­ma,” says Eva, a 24-year-old Lon­don-based artist. Although she grew up in Aus­tralia, one of the most LGBTQ+ friend­ly coun­tries in the world, she did­n’t feel safe using her mum’s cred­it card to watch a queer film before com­ing out, so secret­ly down­loaded les­bian flicks like Annabelle via a YouTube-to-MP4 converter. 

Even some cre­atives who make movies are cool with peo­ple tak­ing them. Luna Car­moon, direc­tor of this year’s excel­lent Hoard, grew up watch­ing hun­dreds of movies on Put­lock­er as a work­ing class film­mak­er. ​“I would­n’t be the per­son I am today with­out pira­cy. I’d be real­ly bor­ing. I was lucky enough to be the first gen­er­a­tion who could trav­el the world instant­ly via these stream­ing links and the blessed gods of sub­ti­tles,” she says.

She’s grate­ful for the pirates’ buc­ca­neer­ing spir­it. ​“I’ve got to dis­cov­er so much out­side of my small world. I hope that loads of peo­ple find my work [ille­gal­ly] and go down a rab­bit hole of cin­e­ma. I think that’s pret­ty fuck­ing sweet. I adore the patron saints of pira­cy,” she con­tin­ues. Lau­ra agrees: ​“I can’t imag­ine as a teenag­er with no mon­ey not being able to pirate films and music. That’s why I sup­port it.”

All of this makes the mes­sag­ing for anti-pira­cy advo­cates a real headache. For starters, sim­ply bring­ing up pira­cy can be a bad idea. ​“Even talk­ing about oth­er peo­ple’s pira­cy (iron­i­cal­ly as we’re doing now) will increase pira­cy by mak­ing it more salient. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing peo­ple do not like being told that they’re not allowed to do fun things,” Dr. Whit­man says. When it comes to the cam­paigns, they have, of course, learnt from their mis­takes. Steal­ing a car is not like steal­ing a movie. ​“This ad was real­ly a les­son in how not to deter a crime. The lev­el of threat implied in the advert was not reflec­tive of the crime — to the point of ridicule,” she continues.

Fear, though, is still the main weapon. FACT churns out con­tent about the dan­gers of ille­gal stream­ing, warn­ing us that crim­i­nals prof­it from con­tent and that we are left at the mer­cy of mal­ware and virus­es. ​“Late­ly [some sites] have down­loaded dan­ger­ous files onto my com­put­er. So it’s not ide­al,” Lau­ra con­cedes. Any­one who has ever used a shady foot­ball stream­ing site knows first­hand the amount of unsavoury pop-ups that appear. But, after a few (read: about 3000) clicks of var­i­ous red ​‘Xs’ you’re on your way.

Per­haps, appeal­ing to altru­ism is the answer. ​“If you can indi­cate to peo­ple that pira­cy has a detri­men­tal effect to a local com­mu­ni­ty – affect­ing local busi­ness­es, cre­atives and char­i­ty endeav­ours – peo­ple are far more moti­vat­ed to reduce their ille­gal con­sump­tion. This sug­gests that peo­ple do care about harm to oth­ers, just that typ­i­cal­ly the harm of pira­cy is too dis­tant for peo­ple to wor­ry too much about,” says Dr. Whitman.

But it’s this dis­tance that makes pira­cy so palat­able for so many of us, and some­thing that doesn’t trig­ger pangs of guilt. ​“I know it’s prob­a­bly doing some dam­age to the film indus­try but I don’t feel bad about it,” Lau­ra says. Many peo­ple who pirate do draw some lines. Rhys, for exam­ple, would nev­er pirate porn as it direct­ly impacts sex work­ers. Lau­ra, mean­while, still reg­u­lar­ly goes to the cin­e­ma and wouldn’t pirate some­thing she real­ly rat­ed. ​“I still go to the cin­e­ma and pay for films. I don’t feel like I’m com­plete­ly not sup­port­ing the arts. I’d nev­er pirate a real­ly icon­ic or gor­geous film or some­thing new that comes out that does­n’t look like shit,” she says.

But there’s still a sat­u­ra­tion point in terms of what peo­ple can afford. And Eva believes that this sort of mes­sag­ing is rich com­ing from the gov­ern­ment. “[The war on pira­cy] is just a scape­goat for defend­ing art that already exists in an envi­ron­ment where it’s chron­i­cal­ly under­fund­ed,” she says. Plus, it’s hard to feel bad for the stream­ing sites when they them­selves give so lit­tle to artists: Spo­ti­fy may be legal, but isn’t pay­ing artists up to $0.004 per stream basi­cal­ly day­light rob­bery? Rhys feels the same about footy. ​“I think there’s a Robin Hood effect. Until they do some­thing rel­a­tive­ly respon­si­ble for the fan base [like sup­port­ing grass­roots foot­ball], I’m just going to get it for free.”

Maybe the real game-chang­er would be slash­ing costs. Rhys says he’d watch foot­ball legal­ly if there was a cheap sub­scrip­tion offer­ing all your club’s games and Lau­ra would stream movies legal­ly if movie ser­vices were as well-stocked as music ser­vices. But once you’re hooked on pirate con­tent – and you’re enjoy­ing some­thing as good as the real thing for free – it’s hard to go back.

When it comes to the big­ger pic­ture, though, Dr. Whit­man thinks it’s about catch­ing the salty sea dogs rather than the measly small fries. ​“Rather than blame the pub­lic, I would advo­cate for more upstream inter­ven­tions. For exam­ple, look­ing at the legal busi­ness­es who facil­i­tate or indi­rect­ly prof­it from pira­cy – I think that’s where the moral issue real­ly lies,” she says, point­ing the fin­ger at advertisers.

But then again, most pirate sites need this adver­tis­ing mon­ey to con­tin­ue. With­out it, there would be no one run­ning the ship for the rest of us; no invis­i­ble gang steal­ing invis­i­ble cars for us to invis­i­bly drive.

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