At any given moment, upward of 100 crack MPA investigators are on the hunt of pirates — not unlike the king’s sailors of olden days, ready to do battle. But the MPA is chasing those who would co-opt the world’s intellectual property.
That’s the reassuring message of Jan van Voorn, the MPA’s executive vice president and chief of global content protection, who claims to bound out of bed every morning, eager to take on the malefactors.
“I’m out there to protect the legitimate content creators, big and small. We’re out there to keep the marketplace clean, and most of the time we’re dealing with very bad guys. I’m happy to oppress the bad guys and let legitimate companies thrive.”
Bad guys emerged instantly when the home video revolution enabled mass duplication of bootleg cassettes, and later DVDs, to be sold cheaply from black market to flea market. Such centralized operations gave way, with the dawn of the internet, to a decentralized model in which individual file sharers would trade content with their friends — a much harder paradigm to monitor, van Voorn concedes.
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