What sanctions need to be introduced to the market and what can we learn from other countries when it comes to online piracy? These are only some of the questions that will be discussed by renowned speakers at the panel entitled “Fighting pirates in the CEE region” during NEM 2108.

Marijana Vukašinović, Head of Content Management at Telekom Serbia, will be moderating this panel that will gather the following speakers: DamirHajduk, Chairman of the Agency for Electronic Media, Irena Battelino, Head of Content Acquisition and Media Marketing Services at Telekom Slovenia, Chris Anderson, Head of Film & TV services at MUSO, and Mark Mulready, Vice President of Cybersecurity Services at Irdeto.

“This discussion is important, as to effectively combat online piracy, operators must combine state of the art anti-piracy technologies with proactive enforcement and investigative services aimed at identifying and prosecuting the parties involved in large commercial streaming piracy networks”, said Mulready, who is responsible for the global delivery and management of a suite of Piracy Control and Cybercrime Prevention Services.

Croatia is the fourth country in the world in terms of the prevalence of piracy – we download content illegally more often than other countries. Above us are only Latvia, Bulgaria and Lithuania, whereas immediately below us are Spain, Greece and Serbia.

This data is taken from the 2016 report – based on an analysis of the global traffic of 14,000 largest piracy websites – put out by MUSO, a company providing anti-piracy solutions, whose Head of Film & TV services is NEM's panelist Chris Anderson. Anderson has revealed that visits to piracy websites were up 3.4 percent globally from 2016. He claims that with the recent proliferation of VoD subscription services many expected demand for illegitimate content to have significantly dropped, but this is not the case.

“The vast majority of visits were made via web-streaming sites (96.1 percent), with access via mobile devices (51.92 percent) rising up the ranks to become the most popular way of consuming illegitimate content, and towards the end of 2017, torrent-based television piracy had a resurgence”, said Anderson emphasizing that their intelligence, insights and analyses cover the whole market.

However, laws aren't there to be broken, which is shown by Germany where only 1.71% of the internet population uses pirated digital content. If you download a TV show or movie in Germany, you can be fined with € 900-2000 per TV show or movie.

When it comes to Croatia, internet operators have not authority to check the illegal downloading of digital content from the internet since they have no access to that content. This is possible only with a warrant issued by a court.