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Paris, May 12, 2025
If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ve probably heard some of my travel stories. I’ve been to more countries than currently exist on the world map. Since I first left the United States in 1979, I’ve visited 191 countries, including some that no longer exist and others that didn’t exist when I first began. I’ve lived in 22 of them, in every region of the world. I’ve stood at both the North and South Poles. I once caught a glimpse of the Earth’s curvature from the cockpit of an SR-71 Blackbird. And I’ve seen humanity in all its forms, from war zones to sacred mountains, from disaster zones to royal palaces.
This journey was made possible by my work. In one form or another, I’ve spent my life in media and humanitarian service, sometimes as a news producer documenting wars and revolutions, sometimes as a filmmaker capturing rare wildlife or complex cultures, and other times as an NGO official working on the ground during humanitarian crises. From Baghdad to Kinshasa, from Sarajevo to Bogotá, my job was to tell stories, often in places where stories are hard to tell.
But when I look back on all those years, one thread has emerged that I didn’t fully notice until now. In markets, on sidewalks, in subway corridors and hotel lobbies, I saw it everywhere. It was so pervasive, so ordinary, that I didn’t really process what it meant at the time. That thread is piracy, not the kind with ships and treasure, but the kind that steals something far more fragile: intellectual property.
In every country I visited, I saw pirated films and television shows being sold or screened. In African markets, vendors laid out homemade VHS tapes labeled with Hollywood titles. In Asia, kiosks stacked hundreds of bootleg DVDs side by side with mass-produced counterfeit CDs. In Latin America, children watched American cartoons that had never officially aired in their country. In the Middle East, I watched bootlegged versions of blockbuster movies in hotel bars before they had even premiered legally in the region.
In the 1980s, I walked through East Berlin and saw a state-run theater playing American movies without any licensing agreements. Nobody thought twice. A decade later, I saw the same movies duplicated on hundreds of CDs and sold for pennies in Cairo, Nairobi, and Phnom Penh. By the 2000s, I was finding the same pirated media in places where you’d expect stronger enforcement, like Paris, Toronto, and even New York.
At the time, I didn’t connect these moments to anything bigger. I was usually preoccupied with more immediate concerns: staying alive, navigating a war zone, negotiating with fixers or authorities, or trying to get a camera crew past a military checkpoint. Piracy was just visual background noise, an ever-present undercurrent that never made it into my shot list.
But today, as a producer and media company owner, I can no longer afford to ignore it. Piracy, in all its forms, has become a direct threat not only to my industry, but to the livelihoods of millions of professionals: writers, actors, editors, designers, publicists, and even the interns who help make magic happen.
It has also become one of the most underreported causes of Hollywood’s slow unraveling.
In 2023 alone, there were approximately 229.4 billion visits to piracy websites globally, according to CTAM. Of those, nearly half targeted TV content, and about 13 percent focused on movies. These numbers are staggering not only because of their scale, but because of what they represent: billions of instances where people chose to consume creative work without compensating the people who made it.
As of 2024, the global piracy rate for movies and TV shows stands at around 31 percent. In the United States, one in three adults admits to illegally streaming or downloading entertainment content in the past 12 months.
What’s worse, piracy today is often more sophisticated than legitimate services. Many illegal platforms offer high-definition quality, instant playback, and minimal ads, sometimes even better user interfaces than what legal streaming platforms provide. These sites are monetized not through subscriptions, but through ads, malware, and stolen data. In effect, consumers are paying with their privacy while creators lose their paychecks.
Hollywood is hemorrhaging money. Industry estimates suggest the global movie sector alone loses between $40 billion and $97.1 billion annually to piracy. In the United States, the number is at least $29 billion each year. That revenue loss has a ripple effect.
The entertainment industry supports more than 2.32 million jobs in the United States and pays out $229 billion in total wages, according to the Motion Picture Association. Every $1 billion lost to piracy potentially impacts more than 11,000 jobs. That includes not only A-list actors and directors, but also the caterers on set, the prop builders, the costume stitchers, the junior editors, the makeup artists, and the drivers who haul equipment across production lots.
When people pirate content, they don’t just hurt studio profits. They endanger entire ecosystems of workers.
And yet, piracy is rarely treated as a serious crime. Under U.S. law, it is illegal to copy, distribute, publicly perform, display, or stream copyrighted material without permission. Multiple laws govern these acts. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits the circumvention of DRM protections. The No Electronic Theft Act criminalizes even non-commercial distribution. The PRO-IP Act allows for asset seizure. The 2020 Protecting Lawful Streaming Act makes large-scale unauthorized streaming operations a felony.
But enforcement remains inconsistent. Uploaders and website operators may face prison sentences and lawsuits. Developers of piracy-enabled apps like certain Kodi add-ons can be sued. But the average viewer who streams a pirated film? Often nothing happens. Torrent users may face fines or throttled internet speeds from ISPs, but civil enforcement is spotty at best.
Meanwhile, piracy networks have become more entrenched. In 2024, international authorities, including the Motion Picture Association and Vietnamese officials, dismantled the FMovies network, which had racked up more than 6.7 billion visits in just 18 months. In Europe, Italian police uncovered a massive IPTV piracy ring offering access to DAZN, Netflix, and Disney Plus for a fraction of the price. That operation had 22 million users and caused more than 10 billion euros in damages.
In January 2025, the United States introduced the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act, aimed at cracking down on overseas websites that target American consumers with pirated content. It’s a step forward, but enforcement remains a cat-and-mouse game.
Piracy doesn’t just hurt film and television. It damages the music industry, sports broadcasting, and even advertising agencies that rely on commercial viewership metrics. It affects investor confidence, undermines box office and streaming analytics, and contributes to studio decisions to pull back on new productions.
Just look at the shift over the past few years. Studios are reducing content investments. Streaming platforms are canceling shows earlier and removing completed content to save money on residual payments. Theatrical releases are becoming less diverse and more risk-averse, favoring proven franchises over fresh ideas. Many of these decisions are financially driven, and piracy plays a large part in shaping that financial landscape.
When I produced my first TV segments decades ago, there was a sense of permanence in putting a story on film. It would be broadcast, recorded, and archived. Today, it feels more like throwing content into the void. For every person who watches something legally, two or three might watch it illegally. The financial return is diluted. The data is skewed. The creative freedom is constrained.
And yet, the problem is so normalized that it’s invisible.
I remember a time in Mongolia when a cab driver offered me a bag of DVDs as part of the fare. In Kenya, I sat in a café that played the latest Hollywood thriller on a flat-screen pulled from a USB stick. In Istanbul, a man with a laptop offered to download any film I wanted, for a price. In each case, the product being sold was not his to sell. It belonged to someone who had written it, directed it, scored it, edited it, and acted in it. It belonged to a team of hundreds.
People often say piracy is a victimless crime. But it is not. The victims are everywhere, from the soundstage in Burbank to the editing bay in Brooklyn to the casting office in Atlanta. I have worked with them. I have hired them. I have stood beside them when productions folded due to budget cuts. I have seen brilliant talent walk away from the industry because they could not make ends meet.
Piracy may feel free to the end user, but its cost is absorbed by the very people trying to make meaningful, creative work. It erodes not just profits, but possibility.
So what do we do about it?
There is no silver bullet. But there are tools: better education for consumers, more robust legal frameworks, stronger international cooperation, and more innovation from within the industry. Streaming platforms must prioritize access, affordability, and user experience. Governments must treat piracy as a global economic issue, not a niche nuisance. And audiences must be reminded that entertainment is not free to make, even if it feels free to watch.
For me, this realization came too late to change what I saw in those years on the road. But it is not too late to talk about it. As someone who has spent a lifetime documenting the world, I believe we must also document what is happening to our own creative industries.
Hollywood is often seen as a symbol of celebrity, wealth, and spectacle. In truth, it represents something more vital: a global storytelling engine powered by millions of workers, many of whom will never walk a red carpet.
Piracy does not just threaten a business model. It threatens an entire ecosystem of voices. If we stop protecting the work, we will lose not just the stories, but the storytellers. And without them, we risk losing the power to imagine anything different from what we already know.
