The Piracy Panel: Where Hope Goes to Get Stolen
The content piracy panel felt like attending a support group for people being robbed in slow motion while law enforcement shrugs and suggests better door locks.
Representatives from DMCA Force and Takedown Piracy outlined the Sisyphean nightmare of protecting content in 2026, file a takedown, watch it reappear on seventeen mirror sites, repeat until you die or go bankrupt paying lawyers.
The discussion grew heated as panelists and audience members shared war stories about tube sites, aggregate scrapers, and the whack-a-mole impossibility of protecting intellectual property when the economics favor theft.
One studio rep mentioned spending six figures annually on anti-piracy services and still watching their premium content get torrented within hours of release. The math doesn't work. It's never worked. But what's the alternative, stop producing content and let the pirates win by default?
I absorbed this with the grim pragmatism of someone who's watched every technological shift create new attack vectors. DVDs got ripped. Streams got recorded. Now AI can deepfake performers into content they never shot. The only constant is that someone, somewhere is figuring out how to steal your work faster than you can protect it.