On September 26 in Hanoi, the Vietnam Digital Content Creation Alliance (DCCA) in collaboration with Thu Do Multimedia organized a seminar on "Solving copyright protection for the digital music - cinema - television industry".

The seminar aims to share information on the current situation of digital content copyright infringement in general, as well as the music, film and digital television industry in particular, and discuss difficulties in applying solutions to prevent and stop copyright infringement.

Speaking at the Seminar, Mr. Vu Kiem Van - Vice President, General Secretary of the Vietnam Digital Communications Association (VDCA) said that the issue of content copyright protection, especially in the context of digital transformation, is facing many challenges. There have been many conferences and seminars discussing this issue, thereby showing that this is an issue that is of great concern to creative businesses and digital content businesses.

Recognizing that trend, more than 3 years ago, VDCA established and launched the Digital Copyright Center. The Center has an important mission to contribute to solving this pressing problem. Many social-professional organizations and businesses on copyright exploitation and protection have also been established, focusing on movies, music, games, etc., creating an increasingly large force joining hands to contribute to the protection of digital copyright.

According to Mr. Vu Kiem Van, today's discussion once again contributes voices and experiences to the business community and press agencies on this not-so-new but very hot issue. The discussion focuses on the rather specific fields of music, cinema and digital television - the fields with the most copyright infringement cases in recent times and also the most difficult to handle.

Presenting the current situation and difficulties in preventing copyright infringement, Mr. Pham Hoang Hai - Director of the Digital Content Copyright Center, Department of Broadcasting and Electronic Information, Ministry of Information and Communications said that in the past time, the Department of Broadcasting and Electronic Information has coordinated with copyright owners in the field of Broadcasting and Electronic Information to carry out activities to prevent copyright infringement in Vietnam.

According to Mr. Pham Hoang Hai, copyright infringement is currently very complicated, there are a series of illegal websites violating football copyright, especially major tournaments of current events such as the English Premier League, European Cup C1, these illegal websites have up to 1.5 billion views in 2022-2023.

In addition, there are more than 200 pirated websites attracting about 120 million views per month. In particular, recently, it has been discovered that some pirated websites have begun to steal Japanese comic content. This violation has been severely punished by Japan.

"The infringing domain names are hosted overseas, and the owners all post gambling advertisements on the websites. Typical forms of infringement are that copyright owners, when broadcasting and posting on platforms such as OTT, on digital terrestrial television, and digital satellite television, all have their content taken back by the subjects, then livestreamed on social networks as well as infringing websites," Mr. Pham Hoang Hai informed.

Regarding technical measures, Mr. Hai said that the Department of Radio, Television and Electronic Information has coordinated with the Department of Information Security as well as the Copyright Offices to implement measures to detect, then verify and coordinate with relevant units to send information to intermediary service providers - ISPs. Thereby preventing internet users in Vietnam from accessing infringing websites, accordingly, nearly 1,000 websites have been blocked.

However, according to Mr. Hai, currently there are some shortcomings in handling copyright infringement content such as, the prevention measures are not consistent among ISPs, the blocking time is not consistent among ISPs, some ISPs block immediately, some ISPs block after 3 working days or longer. Not flexible enough to deal with new domain names - violators change domain names very quickly, then announce the new name in closed groups on social networks such as telegram, facebook, zalo...

Lawyer Pham Thanh Thuy - Head of Anti-piracy at K+ said that in the context of extremely vibrant digital content distribution, the rapid development of OTT television platforms and online movie publishers has brought users to a completely new era of entertainment content consumption. The convenience of accessing movies, TV shows and live music events on devices has transformed the way audiences interact with content.

However, this digital revolution also brings unprecedented challenges in content security and copyright protection, requiring the emergence of new solutions to protect content from a series of copyright infringement risks.

OTT television service providers such as TV360, FPT Play, and online movie distributors such as Netflix, Hulu, and Hotstar have become important factors in the Internet entertainment ecosystem by meeting the unlimited demand for content. Therefore, ensuring the integrity and exclusivity of released content has become an important issue and a problem that content owners and publishers increasingly take seriously.

Ms. Pham Thanh Thuy said that although domain name blocking measures have begun to be implemented in Vietnam; digital rights management (DRM) solutions such as Widevine, FairPlay and PlayReady have been deployed to prevent unauthorized access and distribution, current copyright protection solutions are still not enough to protect and a multi-dimensional approach is needed to address existing risks.

"In particular, the problem that content providers face in the DRM vulnerability is first of all taking advantage of packet forgery to fool the authorization server (License Server) and bypass the authentication of granting permission to retrieve content for untrusted accounts," emphasized lawyer Pham Thanh Thuy.

In addition to DRM vulnerabilities, attorney Thuy said, OTT TV providers and online publishers face a series of other risks that require comprehensive copyright protection solutions such as: the problem of using screen recording devices for playback or the problem of exploiting Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to circumvent geographical restrictions, allowing access to content from one country and distributing illegal content in another country.

Introducing the technical solution of applying AI technology in copyright protection, Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Han - General Director of Thu Do Multimedia shared that in order to deal with these diverse threats, Sigma Multi-DRM has launched a breakthrough protection solution - Sigma Active Observer (SAO). "This is an innovative solution that goes beyond the limitations of traditional DRM solutions, providing a flexible and active defense mechanism, proactively detecting and reporting copyright infringement risks" , Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Han commented.

According to Mr. Han, the “heart” of Sigma Multi-DRM is SAO, a powerful software toolkit that redefines content security. SAO is not just a security layer of Sigma Multi-DRM, but also monitors every aspect of content distribution and streaming. Using advanced AI algorithms, SAO goes further in detecting and reviewing every data exchange during content distribution on the Internet.

Phan Hoa Giang