Slashdot Mirror
Google Proposes Fighting Piracy By Blocking Ad Money
judgecorp writes "Google has published a report, written by the Performing Rights Society and BAE Detica, which says the way to fight piracy is not to chase the sharers, but to cut off the money in the system. 'Some 86% of advertising on the pirate sites surveyed by Detica comes from networks that have failed to sign up with the UK’s self-regulatory bodies or commit to strong codes of conduct. More than two thirds of the sites that rely on subscriptions or payments display well-known credit card logos. Online advertisers should be encouraged to sign up to self-regulatory codes of conduct. Credit card and online payment facilities, the pirate’s oxygen supply, must be blocked.'But is Google absolutely sure it isn't doing that with AdSense?"
Cutting off the pirates' oxygen supply will help with the bigger outlaw commercial operators. But it won't faze ThePirateBay in the least. Until somebody can come up with a solution to that one, the problem isn't likely to get solved. Longer term though, the bandwidth caps are going to do more to curb the problem on the Internet than anything law enforcement could ever do.
Eventually we will rediscover the bandwidth of sneakernet. Not much to be done about that one. And it gets worse.
Ponder this one 'content industry'... How much storage would it take to store every popular song? How easy is it to pass that around? All somebody needs to add is a P2P phone app that works over WiFi to continually sync new songs in as people socialize. Poisoning might be a problem but hashes can resist that. Somebody really serious about peeing in the industry's corn flake could solve the problems and post 'an app for that.' We are getting close to carrying around enough storage so that every kid could just expect to have 'everything' ever released on a major label sitting in their mobile device. Just a few more turns of Moore's Law. How much longer until the same thing happens with TV & movies? Forget the cloud and monthly fees or paying by the minute, just have every movie or tv show ever made riding around on every phone.
Democrat delenda est
I like how people try to equate making money from copyrighted works with making money from advertisements to pay for the website itself.
They might want to look into the advertising that, some times, comes with certain content. This could actually make piracy lucrative for one individual who is prolific enough to send out a bunch of content with a bunch of adds.
Have all the problems been solved that we now address the none problems ?
Every transaction on a credit card makes money for the middle men.
Interesting sort of incestuous fight within the Royal Court of Capitalism.
Fighting Piracy By Blocking Ad Money
Same here! Adblock+ FTW. And here I never thought I'd agree with Google about anything.
Subject says all.
Well, it kinda didn't work for Wikileaks, so why should it work for TPB?
"The report has failed to take into account the fact that many modern peer-to-peer networks ignore websites altogether, allowing direct communication and exchange of content between the users through software applications and “magnet” links."
Ehhh.... OK.... but where do I click on the magnet link? Isn't that a website like TPB?
Ah, of course. I get it. We need more censorship!
That's how they dismantled wikileaks. Funny that the google would espouse the same solution for torrent sites as the government did for infoleak sites.
Oh well. (shrug). I never pay for pirate sites anyway. I figure if I'm paying to watch a movie or TV show, then I might as well just go buy the legal DVD or amazon release instead... and watch the money goto the actors, writers, artists, etc.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Since all pirates have adblockers, doesn't that make the proposal irrelevant?
Who else read this as: "Google Proposes Fighting PRIVACY By Blocking Ad Money"?
For a nominal fee, all our warez are belong to you?
As long as there is traffic, there will also be advertising. Running ads benefits both the site and the advertisers, after all. They'll just switch to another method.
helping the countries around the Gulf of Guinea with international aid and supplies. Oh wait, this is a story about copyright infringement? And they propose fighting it by any other way than making people think it's somehow morally wrong to copy something without harming the original? Destined to fail. Fittingly my captcha is writhes, something I'm sure all the copyright police are doing in their seats.
The war on piracy hurts them much more than piracy itself, why is Google suddenly backing it?
Please push forward any mechanism to stop piracy, and force them to grow to become even better pirates with better software and hardware, just like how I trim my basil plants to keep them alive and healthy. Cutting them down, they only grow back stronger.
...start with a Google search.
I'd like to be the first to state that the idea that a network has to "sign up with the UK's self-regulatory bodies" is horrifying on so many levels.
First is the notion that a network has to "sign up" to be able to exist. Second is the notion that "self-regulation" is anything but a horrible idea. Third is that not signing up with these "self-regulatory bodies" would disqualify someone from making a living.
If it's a law, then make it a law. This "self-regulation" is nothing but paying juice to the most powerful thug on the block. If you kick up your percentage to the capo, then you can do business. If not, well, a lot of bad things can happen on the Internet, if you catch my drift.
None of this has anything to do with protecting content creators. Not one bit. It is only about making sure that the yegg with the gold is the yegg what gets to make the rules.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well welcome to fascism, another real-life example how F500's and the governments and NGO's they run and vice versa
are interconnected - I wonder shall we just go and call them 'governance' as they call themselves that??
Fuck this new order, new state of affairs or whatever they want to call it.
The only approach that ever had a meaningful and demonstrable effect on spam was to interrupt the flow of money. It makes sense that the same could be helpful for piracy - or at least, for large-scale piracy. Obviously this does nothing to stop people from burning and sharing discs.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It doesn't, the entire point of piracy is that it's centered around a technology that's essentially post scarcity. All those bits, all those ones and zeroes, are so cheap that people provide them to each other for free. People who put up pirated movies, which are usually extremely high quality, don't get any money out of it. Nor do people who volunteer their own bandwidth to give those bits to others.
"Piracy" is a system that has moved beyond capitalism, even while the production of those things that are pirated haven't yet. This is where the problem comes in, but it's not a problem your going to solve by trying to impose capitalism on something that is inherently non capitalist.
It would need a P2p style app on IOS and android that always runs in the background using NFC and bluetooth to discover hosts. You'd become a node in a sneaker network. Imagine how fast data replicates on school grounds and in busy shops. Lots of potential to link in local product promotions too.
The banks and paypal will cut off pirate sites like they did with wikileaks, and bitcoin will take off massively as TPB starts to promote it to everyone visiting their site. Then they'll cut off the exchanges and bitcoin will be practically useless.
Piracy is not about sharing data....is about making profit from it. The "legal" frame is another issue....because companies according their own interests make the law.... The best way to combat piracy is to charge us$2 per downloaded movie/music album.
Why not give the people what they want full access too all musical works from all record companies with proper ownership rights.. Can't be that hard and all the money wasted on litigation could have paid for that service already.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I noticed www.paidandroidappsforfree.com now goes to a google 404 - does that mean google bought out the domain?
... and profit.
Pirates will switch if you block revenues. That will have a very nice side effect on Bitcoin-based economy.
What Google is saying is not that they are against Piracy (and their Ad Money), but they are against anyone else at all to take their money (because Google cannot take them anymore, or for one or another reason will be forced to cut them off). As simple as that, Google's new moto:
- We do not do evil, but only if no one else does evil. Oh, and don't look too hard at how we made our first billion...
the way to fight piracy is not to chase the sharers, but to cut off the money in the system
Here's the problem with that:
Relatively speaking, there is very little money in the system.
A vast majority of the economic value generated by the P2P ecosystem is the result of informal bartering.
With P2P, I give a file to you, and you respond by giving another file to me. No money exchanges hands -- yet, we both end up with more value.
Credit card and online payment facilities, the pirate’s oxygen supply, must be blocked.
The pirate's oxygen supply is not money. It's the free exchange of content. Again: I rip and share so that you will rip and share with me.
It's true that there's a small amount of value being extracted from the P2P ecosystem by showing ads and collecting money. Google might be able to reduce that money. But those ads were providing little value to the P2P community anyway; a simple Google search (ironically) will give people all the information they need to fully participate in the P2P bartering economy.
Online advertisers should be encouraged to sign up to self-regulatory codes of conduct. Ad buys have a built-in encouragement mechanism. You spend x dollars for an ad, and you get x+y dollars back in new revenues. Google's idea is like saying companies should be encouraged to boycott advertising in the Superbowl because the state it's being played in doesn't celebrate Martin Luther King Day. It feels good in principle, but it pisses off the shareholders.
Its been over 15 years of /. covering the same repeated drama over copyright legislation with the MPAA/RIAA smash fly with hammer and screw what breaks mentality. Its not new, and its not stopped, and its really put a damper on my enthusiasim for most copyright claimaints. Then there is microsoft, and all these years of running linux and (mostly) free software.
Everytime I hear "Copyright" I think hindering innovation and exploitation. My desire to see any pirates pursued at this point is nill.
sssh, all they are going to do is get rid of some shiesty advertisers, and won't affect anything. Its really fine by me
Shiesty advertisers are in the same catagory as spam.
p2p is people sharing. Let them go after the rip off artists
Let's not forget who's the organized crime here! ;)
Who is "selling" information as if it were tangible commodities, not moving a single finger for that copy, but taking money, and then having the audacity, to call *us* "thieves"!!
Not to forget, the original work wasn't even done by them, but by some poor schmuck who got ripped off *exactly* the way they accuse us of acting. (Well, I guess they are the experts on it.
The content Mafia is!
Also: Please tell me how this will stop decentralized P2P file sharing...
And how about darknets?
Hm?
This also works with unpopular opinions and content.
Case in point, Recently SomethingAwful's harassment of the TVTropes website reached a head when they started attacking TVTropes by complaining to Google about Trope pages that had odd content. The example was "Naughty Tentacles" which was the cliche of tentacles in anime tending towards being somewhat risque even in non-risque works. Google pulled all advertisements from their site until this page was removed and cut all their advertising money.
The catch being that Naughty Tentacles and other "Not Safe For Google" pages were not serving Google Ads, which means that Google is now claiming that if you have an Ad Sense ad on a SINGLE page then Google has editorial rights on ALL pages on your site.
That sick feeling in your stomach is normal, it merely means you are wise enough to realize what a huge disaster this could possibly be.
(Not to say that TVTropes handled it well themselves. The administrator had a very public nervous breakdown over the whole thing, began harassing anyone who posted Japanese media tropes, tried to argue that Romeo and Juliet was child pornography because R&J are both 14, etc etc... Many people, including myself, were publicly banned and our names dragged through the mud because we disagreed with his "great porno purge" on what was supposedly a collaborative website.)
Another recent example of something similar was when the concern troll at L7World began harassing websites that hosted "Kodmo No Jikan", a very risque Japanese manga involving a precocious child abuse victim and the male teacher who is the subject of her torment (and who is attempting to save her from her abusive stepfather). While the content is... as close to pornographic as possible without actually reaching that point, the fact of the matter is the L7World troll used as many "fainting couch" attacks he could, including photoshopping things out of context and directly attacking the Advertisers that went through Google, to harass every manga hosting website he could. (He then later admitted he likes KnJ, reads it, and was just fucking with as many people as he could because he could get away with it.)
Several months later, a similar attack was done by someone claiming that all Manga hosting websites had to remove not only any works with underage characters -- but also any manga works that had Gay or Lesbian themed content, because the "web is a product of the United States, a Christian Nation, and thus they had a duty to uphold Christian morals". When this troll was ignored and banned for these frothy rants, suddenly Google was getting all kinds of complaints out of the blue about these sites and pulled their advertisement money.
This attack destroyed OneManga, severely hurt every other manga site, et cetera. Even sites that do not host manga, and are simply series database sites, such as BakaUpdates, were affected. So don't think that you're only in danger if you host Troll-Unapproved content, if you talk about things that trolls don't like, they can go through Google to attack your site now.
And before anyone takes umbrage with the "underage characters" part, I would point out that the most popular children's comic in the world, Doraemon, as well as The SImpsons technically fall under the same overreaching umbrella of what this troll was complaining about, and are not pornographic by any sense of the word.
tl;dr: In short, I find it very unsettling that Google is openly bragging about the possibility that legal trolls such as the MPAA could now use attacks that Religious fundamentalist trolls (and, in the case of SA, just plain normal trolls) have used to silence websites that they do not agree with.
If I had mod-points right now, I'd upvote this. But I don't.
Oh well. You beat me to the punch by mentioning the TvTropes incident. And yes, that is bloody terrifying. Though really, advertising hitting publishers with the money stick to impose their editorial will is nothing new orbiting the sun.
That doesn't mean I have to like it.
The worrying thing is, many of these withdrawals are pretty much automated. Google has an almost machine-like bureaucratic apathy to the advertising world, it's systems grinding mindlessly along uncaring how automated reports are. It'll yank them anyway because it doesn't cost them anything to do so. It's the cheapest and easiest option. It's expensive to actually follow up the report and investigate the actual circumstances.
That requires a salaried employee with a brain.
Or in short form. I agree with everything you said, and just wanted to try post more than 'I agree with everything you said'
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
But that's where the idea breaks down completely! Because advertising and marketing people are WAY bigger scumbags than pirates ever were.
They will always find a way to get money back to people who create a reason for advertising people to exist...
Or would have done. Well, first they would have blocked DNS for site too, but that was dropped from the bill after the early complains.
After that, all SOPA/PIPA did was make it possible to block payments to sites which hosted infringing content.
I would say that the rejection of SOPA/PIPA means the internet rejected this idea, except i think few actually bothered to read or understand SOPA/PIPA before passing judgement on them.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
- First, this move reeks of hypocrisy from Google's side. YouTube, for example, hosts gigabytes and gigabytes of copyrights violations that - I have no proof but I'm strongly convinced - make up a large part of its traffic and therefore of its income. They get away with it by deleting copyrighted content if and when it's spotted by its owner, but when legislators start talking about measures that would effectively stop their exploitation of piracy, like forcing them to review videos before making them visible, they adduce "technical problems" preventing them to comply.
Let it be clear, I'm all for loosening copyright protection and favourable to the free exchange of information; I just can't stand double-facedness.
- Second, but most important, I find it extremely creepy for a private company that knows everything about every individual on the planet to start playing the role of the law enforcer. This brings us closer to the dystopian realities described by science fiction writers (and feared by Cassandras such as RMS). We've already seen digital death penalty without due process being applied against selected baddies in the recent years, the next step is to extend its applicability to all individuals of the free world.
Perhaps they'd have to find some way for peers to share data with each other.
old cracker (first crack was ultima 5, nice XOR encryption of the copy protection, increasing the key by 3 after each byte, the code jumpted to the adress where INT 3 is located in an attempt to break stuff up (litteraly put a jump byte at where INT 3 address was supposed to be) and then made some INT 10h drive checks, which I simply bypassed by replacing the following CMP with a NOP, and re-encrypting it with a XOR of the correct position. Good time finding the crack. I shame myself I had more fun finding the crack than finishing the game). Now working at an IT/ISV outfit.
But whereas I came to the similar/same conclusion as you "me copying won't make a cent for the indy dev", I went one further "but me not buying his/her stuff won't make a cent to them either". So often I download "shotgun like" music, video, and games. Then I try, and what I like I visit the web page to buy. Like minecraft I enjoyed so much the first day, I immediately bought in the beta a long time ago. Like some CD I bought from a german group (they were in the game gothic 1 , it was the band you saw inside the first city).
The ultimate fact is, if I do not plan to buy, me downloading DO NOT remove any money from the indy dev. I do a try-and-buy model. Sure some people are cheapstake and don't buy, but they would not have bought ANYWAY. So from those two group of people (the "cheapsake" and the "tryer") there is no financial drain.
No the only group which IS a financial rain, are those which would have brought the game otherwise but instead sicne it is available for free they don't buy it. I have yet to find a study which quantify that group properly. Because they are the one on which indy will lose money. My gut feeling is that they are a relative minority, but it is not something I could formulate as an hypotheses properly and falsify. But ifI had to place a bet I would say there is 74% cheapsake, 25% try-and-buy and 1% of "would have bought but found it for free". Simply because you don't use download service accidentaly.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Reminds me of a person whose name I will not mention. I used to troll his blog. He was one of those political fanboy types - the ones who support their faction with the frenzied loyalty of a sports fan. His particular faction was the conservatives, and most of his posts involved rants about the anti-american evils of the 'lefty loonies.' He was really a fanatic, believing it was his patriotic duty to purge the internet of those of opposing factions.
One day he got into a bit of a feud with another blogger - I don't know what their blog was about, but I think it was something to do with native american interests. Heated words were exchanged, then flames and rants. It escalated. He ended up buying a domain name matching his opponents blog (They were someblog.blogspot.com, so he purchased someblog.org), setting up a blog there using their handle, and proceeding to make many posts calling for the legalisation of child pornography and expressing 'his' view that the age of consent should be removed as children would benefit from a healthy introduction to sex at as young an age as possible.
At that point, his blog suddenly lost all commenters, including me. We were all scared away, terrified of what he might do should we ever attract his attention. The last thing I saw was him defending his actions by saying that he purchased the domain so the handle belonged to him now, and that somebloger was just showing how easily offended lefty loony moonbats were.
Beginning to dislike you, i am.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The sites are overloaded with ads anyway. Back to the roots, releasing for the honor instead for the money.
http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin/How-big-are-the-Bitcoin-ad-networks