Technology

Crawling The Web

The basis of our anti-piracy engine is our advanced Web crawler (or spider). Many people are familiar with the concept of crawling and indexing web pages in the context of search engines, like Google. Google builds its gigantic search index primarily by crawling the Web.

However, our spider is different from Google’s: instead of crawling the entire Web, we narrow our focus onto sites known to directly host, or at least provide links to, infringing content. These include torrent tracker sites, one-click download sites, mp3 sharing sites, and even YouTube, where our customers’ copyrighted content is often posted without permission.

Identifying Infringements

We use a three-stage system to indentify infringements, once our spider has indexed Web content: pattern-matching, statistical modeling and expert staff review.

[tabs slidertype=”top tabs”] [tabcontainer] [tabtext]Pattern-Matching[/tabtext] [tabtext]Statistical Modeling[/tabtext] [tabtext]Expert Staff Review[/tabtext][/tabcontainer] [tabcontent] [tab] First, we apply a series of pattern-matching filters, to remove links that may appear at first to be infringing, but that we understand from experience are not. [/tab] [tab] Second, we apply statistical models which promote the links most likely to be infringing, based on highly segmented performance indicators–as well as other factors–and those promoted links are given priority in our system. [/tab] [tab] Third, our staff of anti-piracy experts conducts a final pass, reviewing the candidate links produced automatically by our anti-piracy engine. Although our engine does everything possible to minimize the need for human screening, and to expedite infringing links through our system, we believe that the best quality results come from applying a human touch, just where it’s needed. [/tab] [/tabcontent] [/tabs]

DMCA Takedown Notices & Compliance Monitoring

Once we’ve identified infringements, we issue DMCA takedown notices. Once those are sent, our engine begins monitoring the links contained in the notices for compliance with the DMCA takedown requests.

After a grace period, if the infringing links haven’t been removed by the site operators we notified, then we automatically issue a second wave takedown notices. Another grace period is given for compliance with our second wave of takedown notices, after which time, we may opt to notify registrars and internet payment service providers, informing them of non-compliance and violations of their terms of service.[/box]