2025考研英语一 · 阅读理解 Text 3

Ever since taking on Netflix Inc. at its own game, old Hollywood has struggled to turn a profit in streaming, with the likes of Disney+, Peacock and Paramount+ losing billions of dollars each year, sparking concerns that the services will never be as profitable as cable once was. But the age of streaming has been a boon for some unintended winners: pirates that use software to rip a film or television show in seconds from legitimate online video platforms and host the titles on their own, illegitimate services, which rake in about $2 billion annually from ads and subscriptions.

With no video production costs, illegal streaming sites have achieved profit margins approaching 90%, according to the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a trade group representing Hollywood studios that’s working to crack down on the thousands of illegal platforms that have cropped up in recent years.

Initially the rise of legitimate online businesses such as Netflix actually helped curb digital piracy, which had largely been based on file uploads. But now piracy involving illegal streaming services as well as file-sharing costs the US economy about $30 billion in lost revenue a year and some 250,000 jobs, estimates the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center. The global impact is about $71 billion annually.

“The people who are stealing our movies and our television shows and operating piracy sites are not mom and pop operations,” says Charlie Rivkin, chief executive officer of the MPA. “This is organized crime.” Rivkin joined the MPA in 2017 after the organization failed five years earlier to build consensus between Hollywood and Silicon Valley to win passage of legislation in Congress aimed at stopping online piracy. In 2017 the association formed the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an enforcement task force of about 100 detectives circling the globe to help local authorities arrest streaming pirates.

ACE says it’s helped shrink the number of illegal streaming services in North America to 126, from more than 1,400 in 2018, aided in part by the MPA’s support for a 2020 federal law that made large-scale streaming of copyright material a serious crime.

Consulting firm Parks Associates predicts that legitimate US streaming services’ cumulative loss from piracy since 2022 will reach $113 billion in the next two years. “While there is some optimism that emerging countermeasures and best practices may see piracy begin to plateau by 2027, there is no consensus among stakeholders as to when it may begin to decline,” says analyst Steve Hawley.