In the Fight Against Piracy, Who’s Accountable for Protection?
Today’s media and entertainment industry is more globally connected than ever. Content creation is faster, more scalable, and distribution opportunities have multiplied. Audiences now engage with stories across platforms, formats, and regions. What once stayed local now moves fluidly between markets. In this new “glocal” reality, content is designed not just to be released but to circulate.
This momentum creates enormous commercial potential for content owners, producers, distributors, and platforms. But with expanded reach comes a familiar and fast-evolving challenge: piracy. Piracy has always posed a threat to content, regardless of territory. But in today’s glocal context, as content travels faster and enters new markets more fluidly, that threat has accelerated. The easier it is for stories to circulate, the more vulnerable they become to unauthorized distribution. As content becomes accessible, it becomes more discoverable and appealing to pirate networks. Each new release increases visibility not only to audiences, but also to piracy networks. The same channels that expand legitimate access can inadvertently open the door to infringement.
This leads to a central question that continues to shape industry conversations:
Who is responsible for protecting content in today’s media ecosystem?
As content moves into new markets, it transitions through various stakeholders. From production to licensing and distribution, multiple entities are involved in its path to audiences. In practice, responsibility for protection can shift depending on how rights are defined and distributed.
In this article, we explore how ownership influences protection responsibilities, and how each stakeholder in the value chain can build grounded, platform-aware strategies that align with the way content is licensed and consumed. Because wherever content travels, protection must follow.
How Shared Rights Define Shared Responsibility
In a multi-layered rights environment, protecting content from piracy is a growing priority, whether a title is originally produced or regionally licensed. Every story has value, and each one is vulnerable to unauthorized circulation.
In today’s media and entertainment ecosystem, rights are commonly distributed across multiple stakeholders. Production companies, distributors, television broadcasters, and streaming platforms all contribute to a title’s lifecycle. Even stakeholders not involved in the early stages of content creation may become commercial participants through licensing or distribution. Regional rights holders curate catalogs based on market-specific dynamics, using their networks and insights as strategic assets. In many cases, this localized expertise creates value equal to that of the production itself, which naturally brings a vested interest in protecting the content.
Piracy continues to be a growing and shared risk for everyone in the chain. It weakens return on investment, disrupts financial planning for new productions, affects employment across the industry, damages licensing relationships, and contributes to price erosion across markets. According to GIPC and NERA Economic Consulting, digital piracy leads to up to 97.1 billion dollars in annual losses for the global film industry. However, the impact is not only financial. Pirated content affects reach, ratings, user growth, and platform traffic. It limits distribution potential, slows market expansion, and reduces the long-term value of the title itself. When content is devalued, it doesn’t just impact revenue. It shortens its lifecycle, weakens market relevance, and erodes IP equity.
Implementing Protection as a Strategic Layer Across the Value Chain
Establishing rigid rules or universal standards for protection may not always be the right approach. The structure of this space can vary depending on the type of content, the nature of rights ownership, and the dynamics of each market. For this reason, the first step should be to treat protection as an essential component of the business model and to plan it strategically from the outset.
A protection strategy can be managed centrally by a single party or distributed among stakeholders. While some rights holders choose to take on the entire process themselves, others prefer to approach it in coordination with their business partners. What matters most is viewing protection not simply as a requirement, but as a value-enhancing layer that strengthens both the IP’s commercial worth and its return on investment.
At DigiGuardians, we’ve seen this approach adopted by many IP owners we’ve worked with over the years. Some producers, even when licensing content to multiple distributors globally, choose to manage protection at a global level. Others implement coordinated models in partnership with regional stakeholders. Distributors show the same variety in approach. Some manage protection at the local level as part of their regional marketing strategies. Others work with studios or producers to build joint models that offer a more integrated framework. This thinking increasingly extends to sales agents as well, who see protection not only as a security layer but also as a lever for driving sales and reinforcing content value.
At this point, one thing has become increasingly clear. Protecting content is not a side consideration, but a core component in the rights ownership chain. Protection can be addressed contractually from the outset or shaped over time through evolving partnerships. What matters is not assigning the responsibility to a single party, but approaching it as a shared function within the broader value chain. Protection can be managed centrally, but it can also be carried out regionally by local rights holders based on market-specific strategies. In some cases, it becomes a collaborative investment that not only safeguards content but also enhances its market value, supporting both monetization and long-term positioning. This approach is not simply about sharing cost. It is about preserving and amplifying the integrity of the IP, the longevity of the content, and its market reach. When protection strategies are built on this mindset, they don’t just defend assets. They help sustain the business model itself.
If you are a rights holder, you have the ability to protect your IP in alignment with the rights you control. In practice, protection can take many forms depending on your position in the value chain. At DigiGuardians, we have worked with a wide range of industry models to design protection strategies that are tailored to specific rights structures. By aligning protection with actual ownership and licensing realities, we’ve helped our partners achieve grounded, measurable outcomes. The more intentional and rights-aware your approach to protection is, the stronger and more sustainable your content’s commercial journey becomes.
