Actor Kamal Haasan’s latest film ‘Vikram’ has been shattering records at the box office. The movie, which had a worldwide release on June 3, has already raked in nearly ₹350 crore. Far from the bustle of movie halls, the 27-year-old Sharath Kumar S and his 12-member team are quietly smashing a different record of sorts pertaining to the movie. “We have removed 14,000 pirated links of Vikram in one week and this is the highest ever we have done at short time,” Kumar said.

Kumar, the CEO and Managing Head of the MassBunk Antipiracy, after graduating in computer science engineering, along with his small group of friends, had helped the film industry with their technical skills.

In 2017, Kumar along with Vignesh V, Ragavendra Rao N, Vedhamoorthy H and Venkatesh J came out with an antipiracy project when the Tamil Cinema was hit by the menace of piracy. At that time, actor-cum-producer Vishal was at the helm of the Tamil Film Producers Council (TFPC). Vishal and TFPC’s former treasurer and producer SR Prabhu decided to rein in the piracy issue. Amid stiff competition, MassBunk Antipiracy was tasked with the responsibility of handling TFPC’s antipiracy cell.

After a two-year stint at TFPC, the team of techies, along with the core members Siva Sankar S, Madhan M, Ramya R and Siva Raman R, started their own journey and directly engaging with the producers . It has since worked for leading movies, including Baahubali 2, KGF, Viswasam, Vishwaroopam 2 and Bigil. Incidentally, Vikram was the 200th project for the MassBunk Antipiracy team.

How it works?

The antipiracy team typically begin their work a week before a movie’s release. “The biggest challenge for any antipiracy agency is to find out the origin of a pirated link. But that’s exactly what our tool is able to do,” Kumar said. The MassBunk Antipiracy team has built a proprietary tool to search and identify pirated links across the platforms. For instance, Kumar said, while pirates earlier used Facebook and YouTube to monetise the pirated content, Telegram has now emerged as the major piracy hub.

“Before a movie’s release, several Telegram channels rename the channel with upcoming movie titles. It is practically difficult to trace all them manually. Hence, we have built our tool in such a way that it can find a pirated channel with all possible name combinations,” Kumar said.

Weaker antipiracy laws

The team compiles a database of major piracy sites, their origin, how they operate and the networks. Since its inception, the company had removed several lakhs of pirated links with unauthorised movie uploads, suspended many official pages & IDs of piracy sites. Also, filed nearly over 40 FIRs against the piracy sites. However, Kumar said, it is difficult to take most of the cases to its logical conclusion due to weaker antipiracy laws and involvement of people from other countries.

“About 90 per cent of piracy happens outside India, especially from countries like France, UK and Europe. We also found that most of these offenders are refugees, so it is very difficult to nab them,” Kumar said. Kumar noted that still many people think piracy as a mistake, but what they don’t realise is that it is a ‘crime’. “We are just like the police, we cannot stop the crime, but using our strength and resources, we will try to bring the piracy under control,” he added.

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