I have been tracking the social media piracy problem for a few years now, and most recently in a research project with Mike Smith from Carnegie Mellon and Yixin Lu from George Washington University, in partnership with VFT Solutions, which has shared data on social media piracy for numerous entertainment and sports events. In a nutshell, piracy in social media is quite pervasive. As an example, VFT Solutions monitored the Fury vs. Ngannou professional cross-over heavyweight boxing match on October 28, recording more than 21 million views on a sample of live piracy streams across social media platforms and web-based piracy sites that have live chat functions to communicate with viewers. That’s a bigger blow for viewership and revenues than any one that the boxers received inside the ring. Wayne Lonstein, co-founder and CEO of VFT, states: “We estimate that about 40-60% of social piracy views are unique, depending on whether the streams are being taken down or not.”