Ether City
Content Protection through Machine Learning and Automation

People’s lives today revolve around the Internet, digital technologies, and enormous content. While the modern lifestyle offers abundant opportunities for talented individuals to build innovative business models, the concomitant rise in online content piracy threatens businesses and careers. From creative professionals offering new songs and music videos to indie software developers to sports channels, every entity is hounded by pirates who either leak their content online or resell it in the dark web for personal gains. While there are solutions to tackle piracy, most of them are manually-driven and work with a small subset of online data. At a time when the piracy industry is racing ahead with superior technologies to hoodwink the security agencies and regulatory bodies, the industry needs smart solutions for securing the content.

Addressing the gaps in tackling online content piracy is Ether City, a Brazilian company that provides customized content protection solutions to investigate, monitor, detect, and delete illegal content. Ether City combines complex data mining techniques, automation, and machine learning to analyze content at scale and identify every potential threat forensically. Such a comprehensive approach saves the day for the true content owners in the online space. “Through machine learning, we not only automate the mundane human tasks in the analysis but also improve its quality and scale for maximum outcomes for more than 50 brands globally,” says Rodrigo Arrigoni, CEO of Ether City.

At the core of Ether City’s value proposition is Collective Intelligence (CI), a suite of content protection solutions. Rather than stopping at finding answers to the specific questions of its clients, CI takes a well-rounded analytical approach to uncover even the most sophisticated threats online.

“Our approach is to mimic a user who is searching for a software or content,” says Arrigoni. “We explore the channels that the user might use and collect data continuously.” CI mines more than 40 different sources, including websites, social media, mobile groups, app stores, search engines, website ranking tools, data marketplaces, and more. Rather than crawling a website for suspicious content like other content protection solutions in the market, CI mines all the website data and gathers it in its data lake where it is combined with diverse data sources for analysis.

CI mines all the website data and gathers it in its data lake where it is combined with diverse data sources for analysis

CI employs a mix of explanatory, descriptive, and longitudinal research techniques for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Regardless of the different data types coming from diverse marketplaces, CI, through machine learning, classifies and models data based on its morphology and completeness. It inspects the behavior of data to assess how contaminated the online space is for a user who is searching for particular content or software. Ether City offers the results of the analysis in the form of presentations, reports, and whitepapers. It also provides live dashboards and API integrations through which firms can use those insights directly to make decisions.

As a value add, Ether City offers a dedicated notification system that works with complex data to deliver accurate reports to the users. The system uses machine learning to filter the research results based on pre-defined criteria, which is driven by incremental intelligence. The system, however, allows people to intervene and make decisions based on their choice. The team at Ether City has content protection specialists with decades of experience who can provide automated generic analysis of the illegal audio-visual services and software present online.

To mine information from special sources, Ether City maintains a dedicated social engineering section. What’s more, the company offers a special browser for online investigation and is preparing to launch a new product and expand its reach to the dark web, soon. “Our clients appreciate our commitment to quality through innovation, technology, and domain knowledge,” concludes Arrigoni.