As Pirates Run Rampant, TV Studios Dial Up Pursuit

By the glow of six flat screens inside a windowless room in a California office tower, three content cops from NBCUniversal watch as pirated versions of the cable-TV drama "Suits" begin popping up on the Internet within minutes of the show's closing credits.

At first, they come in ones and twos, but in an hour there are 444 unauthorized links to that Thursday night's episode on its USA Network. In two hours more, that number more than doubles, opening up the show to millions of Web viewers around the world as translations into languages as varied as Bulgarian and Chinese begin to roll out.

As the pirates click away, the three on the digital beat fire off menacing notices to the website operators hosting the illegal episode, demanding they pull it down.

"It's like whack-a-mole," says Andrew Skinner, the manager of content security for NBCUniversal. "You knock off one and there are 50 more behind it."

Content pirates have sailed the World Wide Web since its earliest days, but today they are bolder, faster and better armed with technology than ever. By many measures, the pirates are ahead. The antipiracy and security firm Irdeto, which works with some of the content companies, said that in 2009 it detected 5.4 billion instances of pirated content online, from movies and television shows to videogames. Last year, that number jumped to more than 14 billion.