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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
Except they won't let you buy what you want. Back in the 70's there was a popular TV show that I enjoyed watching when I was a kid. Go ahead, try to find a DVD set of "WKRP in Cincinnatti"... My wife's cousin came over and lamented how she could only find the 1st season on DVD but the music wasn't what was in the original show... I relayed that I had also been hoping to buy the DVD set... So I went to TPB and downloaded the full series with original music.
WKRP is credited for popularizing many songs back then and helping artists rise to fame. However, the reason there are no DVD sets of WKRP is allegedly because of the difficulty in licensing the music from the content providers. When WKRP shows are aired in re-runs, they are aired with crappy sound-alike music... In many episodes, the songs are contextual so part of the plot is ruined when they removed the music.
As the cherry topping, I introduced my 10yo son to WKRP and he devoured all of the episodes, watching some of them twice and three times; with original music... He enjoys the music and has been buying it from iTunes...
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.