Film production firm in Manila becomes first entertainment firm to fight piracy
16 April 2025
As the first entertainment-driven company to combat online piracy and counterfeiting, Viva Holdings, Inc. and its 37 subsidiaries signed the Ecommerce Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Tuesday to improve the protection of its retail products and content across digital platforms.
Viva Entertainment. Image from Viva Entertainment
Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL), which facilitates the agreement, views Viva’s participation in the MOU as a significant step toward motivating more creatives to safeguard their intellectual property rights, which will support company expansion and open up new avenues for the creative industry.
“The more stakeholders we encourage to join the Ecommerce MOU, the more cooperation we have, giving IP rights holder signatories like Viva a more efficient mechanism to protect their content from pirated uploads and streaming, as well as inspire other content creators to take charge of their IP assets,” IPOPHL director general Brigitte da Costa-Villaluz added.
The MOU, established in 2021, makes a voluntary code of conduct for ecommerce participants, which facilitates the detection and removal of illegal products and content. It is hailed as an example of cooperative enforcement, particularly beneficial in the digital economy because illegal content may proliferate quickly.
The action would help safeguard Viva Communications’ content assets against piracy, which he says threatens 80 percent of the business’s potential revenue, according to Viva chairman and CEO Vicente del Rosario Jr. “If not for piracy, we could have a bigger budget to create more content for our audience to enjoy, but we’re getting less than what we hope to get. If not for piracy, we could be a formidable creative economy on par with South Korea,” he added.
He bemoaned how the digital age made piracy faster and more sophisticated, necessitating creative strategies to quickly take down pirated streaming links and hard drives containing massive volumes of Viva content being sold online, even though he acknowledged how the streaming industry drove their profits to new record highs.
The future of its artists, content creators and managers – who propel the expansion of the creative economy – will depend on tighter collaboration with online platforms, according to Viva. The company also expressed gratitude for IPOPHL’s leadership in creating and overseeing the Ecommerce MOU.
- Excel V. Dyquiangco
