TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY MAY BE FUN, BUT ONLINE PIRATES ARE A REAL THREAT TO BUSINESS

Ahoy matey! People may be swashbuckling and shivering their timbers for ‘International Talk Like A Pirate Day', but an anti-piracy specialist says that UK industries are at risk from a very real, modern and far from lovable form of piracy.

A study released by the Digital Citizens Alliance has revealed how online pirates are making millions of pounds in revenue generated by cyberlockers - file sharing services which are designed to host user files.

The report found that the 30 leading cyberlockers made a combined total of £58.6 million dollars a year from advertising and premium subscriptions to sites which host stolen content.

Ian Noble, the director of anti-piracy specialist DiCopSys says: "When you say the word ‘pirate', most people think of an endearing Jack Sparrow character, with an eye patch and a parrot on one shoulder.

"But there are very real modern day pirates today operating online, stealing content that small UK businesses may have invested thousands of pounds in and posting it on websites for people to view for free.

"The results of this survey confirm that these individuals are generating huge amounts of money while the people who create the content are receiving nothing.

"This reiterates that online piracy poses a very real threat to our creative industries and hard-working businesses of all varieties operating online."

Recent research suggests that piracy costs the British economy £400m annually.

DiCopSys is an anti-piracy specialist which uses US and European legislation to seek out and serve take-down notices to sites that host infringed content. DiCopSys has been ranked as high as 33^rd in the world in the past month by Google for take-down of digital pirated material.

The company recently released its 500,000^th ‘take-down' notice in six months and is achieving an 81 per cent success rate.

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Notes for editors:

Caption for attached picture: Image of the infamous Jolly Roger (licensed under the Creative Commons. Created by ‘WarX’, edited by Manuel Strehl)

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