The NFL Playoffs Are Prime Time for Digital Piracy

The NFL playoffs are an exciting time for football fans to watch the chase for the Super Bowl. It was a uniquely American obsession that has increasingly captured the attention of live sports fans worldwide.

It’s also prime time for live sports piracy, and American lawmakers must enact measures to protect these live broadcasts.

Professional and amateur sports are among the most popular live-streamed content—watched by 61% of viewers who subscribe to streaming services. Yet a study of 6,000 sports fans across 10 countries also found that 51% of the group pirated live sports monthly, despite 89% having at least one streaming subscription.

A 2023 Harvard Business Review study found that 35% of NFL fans surveyed watch football games on pirated streaming services.
Digital piracy costs streaming services companies approximately $30B in annual revenue, which is expected to rise to $113B by 2027. Live sports streaming piracy alone generates an estimated $28B in annual losses.

Many consumers may not sympathize with these streaming companies, but the impact goes much deeper than the boardrooms and stockholders of these companies. Athletic staff and trainers, creatives who produce advertisements, support staff, and thousands of other workers lose when their work is pirated. Piracy costs jobs and threatens the future of creative content, especially when a creator determines their unique work won’t be protected by copyright.

Many countries have taken regulatory action to protect content creators and streaming services. Over fifty countries allow their courts to block websites hosting pirated content through Internet Service Providers (ISPs), effectively shutting them down, including Canada, Italy, and the U.K.

Last year, India strengthened its anti-piracy protections further by criminalizing film pirating and adding significant financial penalties. The European Union recently proposed strengthening its Digital Services Act to fight digital piracy of sporting events and other live entertainment.

The U.S. must adopt a more aggressive approach to identifying, stopping, and prosecuting digital piracy, primarily since so much pirated content is produced in the U.S. by American content creators.

The current Digital Millennium Copyright Act empowers streaming services and copyright owners to send notices to websites identifying pirated content and demanding its removal. Still, the law is powerless against foreign-owned domains. Since so much digital piracy is driven by foreign actors, more must be done to block pirated content overseas.

In 2011, Congress considered building on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by introducing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would have allowed U.S. Courts to block websites as over 50 other countries allow. However, critics of the legislation were concerned that SOPA infringed on First Amendment rights and would lead to legal trouble for websites like Wikipedia, Google, and YouTube. Critics have also expressed concern about not impinging on the established fair use doctrine that allows copyrighted material to be used under limited circumstances, further chilling free speech.

The blatant theft of publishers', athletes', and creators' works shouldn’t be an issue of free speech, but ensuring legal measures are aimed at websites and streaming services focused on pirating content should strike an appropriate free speech balance. Congress must reconsider legislation allowing pirated content blocking while establishing a process that respects the rights of domains, including dominant providers like YouTube and Google.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) recently outlined a process that a federal judge would supervise. Copyright holders could request a court order to block specific websites. ISPs and the public would have the opportunity to respond if they disagree. The copyright holder would be responsible for demonstrating that the site primarily engages in piracy. This process is expected to last months rather than years. If a block order is issued, ISPs would decide how best to block consumer access to the site.

This approach would allow streaming companies, publishers, and content creators to protect their content from piracy, preserving job creation and sustaining income while ensuring consumers continue receiving and paying for the content they’ve come to expect and enjoy.

Max Eisendrath is the CEO of Redflag AI.