SIIA’s membership includes a variety of businesses: software publishers, educators and test publishers, book publishers, magazine publishers, even newspaper and online content publishers. Combined, these companies continue to lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year to Internet piracy. To protect its members, SIIA employs a global strategy that proactively combats Internet piracy of SIIA’s member companies’ copyrighted works. Software piracy has no geographical boundaries, thus the SIIA monitors the Internet in multiple languages in order to protect member companies on an international scale.Through the various initiatives conducted under its Internet Anti-Piracy Program, SIIA targets piracy of participating members’ products on a wide range of Internet protocols, including websites, auction sites, classified ad sites, P2P networks, Torrent and FTP sites, sharehosting sites and other forms of electronic distribution on the Internet. SIIA staff monitor these protocols using both automated and manual means and a variety of criteria, including but not limited to file size, filenames and their contextual location to generate a list of potential pirated sites.

SIIA evaluates the results gathered from its monitoring and investigations and issues takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) (overseas ISPs receive cease-and-desist notices according to local laws) demanding that the infringing content be removed immediately. Where appropriate, SIIA staff will also issue Cease-And-Desist (C&D) letters directly to the individual(s) responsible for the piracy to prevent future infringements.

In the most egregious piracy cases SIIA will pursues civil litigation against the responsible individuals and organizations. For example, through its Auction Litigation Program, SIIA identifies the most egregious sellers of pirated software and content on online marketplace sites and then sues them in federal court demanding that they cease their infringing activities and pay a steep monetary penalty.

SIIA has ongoing partnerships with several federal and state agencies in joint efforts to combat software and content piracy. SIIA works closely with agencies such as the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Postal Service and other federal and state agencies to protect SIIA member companies’ copyrighted software and content.