MarkMonitor, a provider of enterprise brand protection solutions, announced today that it has acquired DtecNet, a company the helps locate and monitor illegal download activity on P2P networks, blogs, video streaming sites and Usenet services.
Global piracy affects a wide range of digital content, including movies, music, games, software and e-books. The worldwide economic impact of online piracy and counterfeiting is estimated at $200 billion annually, focusing C-level attention on the need for brand protection strategies specifically crafted for the Internet.
With the addition of DtecNet technology, MarkMonitor expands its Brand Protection platform, adding greater breadth in targeting both the distribution points and promotional vehicles for pirated digital content.
“This acquisition is a natural extension to the partnership that MarkMonitor and DtecNet have enjoyed,” noted Sehested. “As one company, we will be able to offer more diverse and highly valued services to our joint customers, helping them eliminate piracy at the source while increasing their revenue and protecting their trusted brands.”
DtecNet founder and CEO Thomas Sehested will join MarkMonitor as a senior vice president. DtecNet’s European operations will expand the combined company’s global coverage, with a development team in Denmark and an operations center in Vilnius, Lithuania.
In September, music industry bodies set out to shut down free file-sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, were responded to with mass cyber-protests using distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) to disrupt the web services of several industry organizations.