Google, Microsoft And Other Ad Networks Agree To 'Best Practices' To Stop Ads From Appearing On 'Pirate' Sites
from the the-details-matter dept
This has been rumored for ages, and the White House has certainly been pushing for this almost non-stop for years, but in a similar vein to the ISPs and the RIAA/MPAA coming to a "voluntary agreement" to implement a six strikes policy, the major online ad networks, led by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) along with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL (and, yes, with the White House) have come to an agreement to stop their ads from appearing on "rogue" sites that are engaged in copyright infringement or selling counterfeit goods via a series of "best practices." The agreement says that the various ad networks who are participating will strive to keep their ads off of sites "that are principally dedicated to selling counterfeit goods or engaging in copyright piracy and have no substantial non-infringing uses."I have some concerns about this, as I'll discuss below, but on the whole it appears that there's actually some good to come out of this. First off, it's worth noting that all of these guys already have terms of service that bar the use of their ads on sites that primarily engage in such things. While various tech industry haters still tend to believe otherwise, the tech industry has been pretty good at keeping their ads directly away from such sites for years. The ads that tend to get on those sites come from tiny third party ad networks that no one has heard of. In fact, some of the "evidence" against Megaupload was that from very early on, Google kicked it out of its ad program.
Another sign that this agreement probably isn't that bad: the MPAA has already put out a statement about how they hate it, saying that it's not enough. Chris Dodd specifically argues that nothing is going to be enough until everyone else does the copyright holders' job for them, and proactively polices the internet. The fact that no one but the copyright holder can know for certain if something is infringing is not even allowed to enter the discussion in the corrupt minds of the MPAA.
In this case, it appears that this new agreement involves something of a more formalized notice and (possible) takedown system. Copyright holders can submit a complaint to each ad network (individually, not to some central authority), and then the ad network gets to decide how it handles the notice -- but, under the best practices, they will strive to keep their ads from appearing on such sites. Since this is just a voluntary agreement, unlike, say, the DMCA, there's no automatic liability shifting in refusing to pull the ads -- and the agreement makes it clear that the best practices themselves do not establish liability, nor do they create a duty to proactively monitor (though, I could see how copyright holders might later try to raise that issue).
The good thing about this program is that it appears those who worked on it clearly recognize that certain copyright holders may be a little over eager in claiming certain sites are "pirate" sites when they might not be. So the program is designed to be more transparent and to include the clear ability for a site to appeal such a decision and get the ad networks to reconsider. In some ways, this is a step forward from the way it was before, in which Google or others might just kick you out of the program with almost no communication and absolutely no right of appeal. In fact, Google is somewhat infamous for its big white monolithic response to kicking people out of its ad network: basically just telling them "you've violated our terms" with no explanation, no way to find out more, and no way to appeal. Adding an actual appeals process is a step up.
That said, there are still two key concerns here. The first is that even with an appeals process and various safeguards, it's quite likely that legitimate sites that have significant non-infringing purposes will still get caught up in this. We've seen too many false takedowns, false attacks and the like for that not to happen. And even with an appeals process, losing your entire ad network for a period of time can completely sink a small business (and, any site making money on these kinds of ad networks is, by definition, a small business -- because none of these ad networks pay out very much to individual sites).
The second concern is a bigger one: which is that if you look at the history of some of the most important innovations that have helped the content industry grow, they almost always start out as what those content industries deemed "principally dedicated to infringing activity." In the early days of radio, cable TV, VCRs, DVRs, mp3 players, YouTube, etc... they were all attacked as being hotbeds of infringement. Yet, as they grew in popularity, business models developed that helped the content industry tremendously. As I've pointed out in the past, it was only four years after Jack Valenti declared that the VCR was the "Boston Strangler" of the movie business that the home video business surpassed the box office in revenue for Hollywood. Yet, if we allow a system where the copyright holders are able to simply starve these new businesses completely before they've had a chance to develop and mature, I worry that we miss the next VCR, the next DVR, the next mp3 player, the next YouTube -- and whatever tool that comes next that allows content creators to do an even better job connecting with fans, creating new works, distributing new works, promoting those works and eventually monetizing those works.
It's easy to simply try to label all new upstarts as "evil" and kill them off, but history has shown that's generally not a very good idea. The reason those upstarts are successful is not that they enable infringement, but rather that they enable something new and useful that people want and like. The real opportunity is in figuring out ways for content creators to use that to their advantage -- and I fear that programs like this make it easier to simply snuff them out too early.
That said, if there needs to be such a program, this one appears to be the least destructive approach. It doesn't create liability or a proactive duty to police the internet. It allows the networks to make the final call on what do with complaints. It gives the accused sites the ability to appeal whatever decisions are made. Either way, I would imagine that the MPAA and the RIAA already have their incredibly long lists of sites ready and are submitting them everywhere they can... and within a few weeks we'll watch them issue statements about how the new program isn't working and how more needs to be done.
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Filed Under: ad networks, appeals process, copyright, copyright infringement, counterfeiting, notice and takedown, piracy, white house
Companies: aol, google, iab, microsoft, mpaa, yahoo
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They don't care, they care about the money. We, the ones who care, should be giving our traffic to other ad networks. Other people better than me at programming could help with some sort of add-on to keep only friendly ad networks unblocked.
Yet, if we allow a system where the copyright holders are able to simply starve these new businesses completely before they've had a chance to develop and mature, I worry that we miss the next VCR, the next DVR, the next mp3 player, the next YouTube -- and whatever tool that comes next that allows content creators to do an even better job connecting with fans, creating new works, distributing new works, promoting those works and eventually monetizing those works.
That's why open source and possibly crowdsourcing will be the future of innovative stuff. As wisely said, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
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Making pirate site more attractiv ethan ever
Thus making "pirate sites" even more useful and attractive than ever before.
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But Still One Big Question
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It's time to develop new business models to replace the ad-driven ones anyway. Sure, it's an easy train to hop onto, but it is unsustainable. You could probably be just as successful selling caps and shirts to support your site.
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The world just seemed polluted with advertising. Then it started happening on the web. Indiscriminate and even obnoxious advertising.
I have come to not mind, and even sometimes like advertising that is for something that I happen to be interested in. Especially on a search results page where little to no personal information is needed.
While some forms of advertising may be a dying business model, I suspect that Google's model is here to stay for awhile. Basically, give everyone a superior experience in exchange for ads taylored just for them. Maybe ads they are even interested in. I find this way less abrasive than ads were in the past.
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Not me. I find the current advertising model (especially targeted ads) far more annoying and abrasive than ads in the past.
It's one of the reasons I avoid using Google services. I might change my mind about Google's service if they gave me the option to pay them money instead of seeing ads and being tracked.
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When it comes to streamed content it is another story. That is where you can end up with a chance of making up to a decent living from ad-revenues partly because of certain industries (mostly tv and radio, but also Cthulus bretheren.) and their demands, partly because of competition, partly because of a few principles from certain companies.
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All the MPAA needs to do is look in a mirror to see who the true 'pirates' are.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-boss-forgets-hollywoods-pirate-history-120428/
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Let's not forget websites that host fanfiction, even when they also host original works.
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I am anti-copyright in general, but I believe that only the original artist should be able to make money from his/her creation (upon registration for such rights, if the artist so wishes). Basically, I think that copyright should be like CC BY-NC, but the artist should have to register for the NC part (and it would be of a limited duration). This retains the incentive to create, but gets rid of a whole lot of copyright insanity.
tl;dr, I agree with the idea in principle.
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When a single song/book/movie can stay locked up via copyright for decades after the death of the creator, and people threatened with fines large enough to buy houses with, it's rather hard to respect the copyright system as-is.
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Again it is demonstrated that the entertainment agents have no clue about the real world and are happily gulping down their own propaganda. Lacking some pay-for-sites, I know of no web sites that are actually making enough money from net ads to make a profit. The overwhelming majority aren't making enough from server costs to even pay for the hosting b/w and other related expenses. Blocking $5 to $10 a month is really gonna hurt I'm sure. /s
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I know what some of you are thinking, and no I don't mean keeping the unauthorized material off the internet. That's just silly and impossible, what I mean is ALL of it. If it's copyrighted, it's gone. No questions necessary about ownership, since even the owners would be barred from putting it on the internet if they placed a copyright on it.
So what if we lose services like Netflix and any newspapers or major parts of online stores such as Amazon's ebooks. The internet will be a safer cleaner place, and isn't that the important part?
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Well, since every form of expression is automatically copyrighted, this would mean that the Internet would only be allowed to present raw, non-expressive facts.
The Internet would essentially become nothing more than a phone book.
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I need that to happen for step #73 in my plan for hell to freeze over.
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Well, yes, but afterword groups such as the RIAA will have to lobby for weaker copyright laws (only because there is no other direction left).
I need that to happen for step #73 in my plan for hell to freeze over.
Well, I think that copyright maximalist groups lobbying for weaker copyright laws would be sufficient by itself to make Hell freeze over!
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How about if we just don't allow any commercial material on the internet?
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bestpracticesguidelinesforadnetworkstoaddresspiracyandcounterfeiting.html
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What about YouTube?
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Oh look, it's the MAFIAA's MO all over again.
And private sites depend on community donations to survive, so again they won't be hurt by the useless money spending.
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In the long term, this is probably good
I'd take a bunch of tech guys over a bunch of bumbling politicians when it comes to designing with a mutual agreement on how to deal with ad networks and copyright infringement any day of the week (and twice on Sundays).
Will this please the MPAA/RIAA? It did for about 0.00000001 seconds, and then Chris Dodd started whining about the tech giants are still refusing to be Hollywood's personal copyright police force.
Will it be effective?
As the Zen Master says, "We'll see."
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I hear people say about piracy (sharing commercial movies/music/books) that the people don't do it for the money, the do it because information wants to be free, etc. etc. Blah Blah... Yet I look around at other sites like mine, and they are plastered with ads.
If all of the ads were suddenly taken away, how many of these sites would remain "for the love of sharing" or "helping to keep information free" etc.? These sites claim they only have ads so they can pay the server bills and other overhead, which I can understand. I however think that most of them are actually turning a nice profit, and if the ads were taken away would shut down pretty quickly.
Would donations help to keep these sites up? Maybe. How would you pay? USPS,PayPal, and everyone else is now watching you, offline and online.
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There are ads on the internet???
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Not going to work.
Also some file hosting sites, like #26 has, don't have ads on them. There are plenty of that all over the internet and such acts like stopping ads appearing to such sites is just meaningless.
So, as a proud pirate, I'm not worried. Nope. Please tell Chris Dodd for me to try harder.
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