Netflix's ominous new piracy crackdown

The streaming giant has long been battling with pirates, having sent over a million take-down requests to Google alone. Photo / 123RF

By offering cheap access to a decent online content library, which includes its own original content, Netflix hopes to put an end to piracy once and for all.

Despite attracting more than 100 million customers worldwide, Netflix's content is still prone to piracy with its own shows like House of Cards, Narcos and Orange is the New Black illegally streamed or downloaded millions of times.

The streaming giant has long been battling with pirates, having sent over a million take-down requests to Google alone, reports News.com.au.

But the company believes its efforts are not enough and is currently expanding its internal anti-piracy division by hiring a "Copyright and Content Protection Coordinator".

Netflix's listing describes the role as being responsible for the "tactical take down efforts
with the goal of reducing online piracy to a socially unacceptable fringe activity".

The company said the right candidate would have experience with anti-piracy initiatives and should be very well versed in managing an effective notice and take down program.

In addition to the sending of take down notifications and monitoring piracy trends in data, the role has a strong focus on going after Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Periscope, Google Search, DailyMotion and other platforms used to facilitate piracy.

Netflix said the successful candidate would perform "day to day scanning" of these sites for infringing content and would "manually address circumvention techniques used on those platforms".

This is what Netflix is hoping to achieve. Photo / Netflix

Hinting that Netflix is also looking to take a proactive approach to the fight against piracy, the job asks the candidate to have "experience of using industry fingerprint technologies and tools to protect content" and the ability to "evaluate new technological solutions to tackle piracy online".

The streaming giant has stepped up its fight against illegally obtained content since last year when it focused its efforts on piracy sites vodlocker.com and uploaded.net.

Last year, Netflix also started blocking Aussie subscribers from using geo-dodging technology to access the catalogue of different countries.

All of these measures are a shift from the blasé stance previously held by the company.

In a 2013 interview, Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings said the company wasn't fazed by piracy as it helped determine what popular shows the streaming service should license in different regions.

"Certainly there's some torrenting that goes on, and that's true around the world, but some of that just creates the demand," he said.