The Hidden Tax of Piracy: Details Into How Illegal Streaming Drains Africa of Jobs, Opportunity and Creative Output

By Rinaldi Jamugisa

While most taxes are financial, sometimes a social limitation exacts a spiritual and social toll from a country. This is the case with content piracy and illegal streaming. The theft of Africa’s creative work drains the continent of its artistic expression; its very ideas.

Creative expression is a human urge, but it can only become a full-time career when it is financially viable. Because of its fundamental importance, entire industries have been built around the sharing of artistic work. In today’s economy, this tends to take the form of digital content steaming – music, movies, series, and live televised entertainment. However, for the same reason that over-the-top (OTT) digital platforms are convenient for sharing content, they also become targets for piracy and content theft. Much-loved entertainment providers like MultiChoice, a Canal+ company, are prime targets for this type of exploitation, which often takes the form of illegal streaming.

A fundamental violation of intellectual property, illegal streaming may come free or extremely cheaply for users. It also generates significant income for the criminal syndicates that prey on the work of Africa’s artists. However, this theft of copyrighted material functions as a tax on the legitimate artists and businesses producing it. Every time a series is pirated, legitimate producers and rights-holders are robbed of fair payment. This means the series itself becomes less attractive to business investment. The threshold at which a show is worth producing becomes that much higher.

For small and growing shows, illegal streaming essentially taxes this content out of existence. Content theft means shows are not commissioned, and the crews – directors, camera operators, make-up artists, sound engineers, among others are robbed of jobs and opportunities. London-based piracy monitoring and content protection firm MUSO has found that unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy,accounting for 96%. TV piracy is by far the predominant form of content piracy, and the organisation detected 229.4 million visits to pirate websites in 2023, a 6.7% increase on the year before.

Piracy is a “hidden tax” paid by creators, crews, sports bodies and customers via lost revenue. It’s also a tax on audiences, through degraded services. Globally, it’s been estimated that digital video piracy costs the entertainment industry up to$71 billion in annual losses. This impact translates into reduced taxation incomes for government, which leaves less budget for social services. IP theft at this scale is therefore a drain on the quality of life of all citizens.

For users, there are numerous risks to using illegal streaming services. Besides contravening copyright law, people subscribing to such services open themselves up to credit-card fraud. Software and devices can become infected with malware, and you run the risk of having your identity stolen. To try to remove this tax on the entertainment sector, law-enforcement authorities launch raids, issue take-down orders and even shut down infringing pirate streamers. Unfortunately, as soon as one platform is taken down, another often appears to take its place.

As Africa’s most-loved storyteller, MultiChoice operates at the nexus of the streaming ecosystem. MultiChoice creates the content that catches the imagination of Africa’s people, it supports thousands of creators who work as staff and suppliers, and it is therefore at the heart of the fight to protect that content. MultiChoice cybersecurity business Irdeto has developed sophisticated tracing and watermarking technologies, which allow them to protect more than six billion devices around the world. The company secures 7.2 -billion streams in a single month, and supports legitimate content through more than 17-billion DRM license transactions.

As a leader of the Partners Against Piracy campaign, the organisation has also helped raise awareness of the impact of illicit streaming, and how to fight it. But to ultimately lift the tax that undermines the functioning of Africa’s creative economy, to free the stories, the ideas and the cultural energy, it’s up to African audiences to take the ethical path, and to support the creators they profess to love. By making the right choices, and paying the affordable subscriptions to legitimate streaming services, we invest in Africa’s storytelling economy. It is only through our own actions that illicit streaming has the power levy such prohibitive taxes on our industry. And it is the actions of the African audiences that can remove those taxes. When users say no to pirated content, they set African creativity free.

The writer is the PR and Communications Manager, MultiChoice Uganda.