Cutting Off Illegal Content’s Food Supply (Sanctions)
The Constable on September 2nd, 2008
In a recent post here at IPThieves, we discussed the problems with issuing take-down notices as a sole method for copyright holders to try to stave off so-called “illegal” sites from giving away copyright-protected material for free. Since then, we’ve spent some time really looking at more effective methods of the copyright holders could use to stop piracy or theft of their intellectual property.
Of course, one of the most popular methods from the RIAA has been to try to scare individuals into not downloading music illegally in the first place by suing or threatening to sue people who do so. Whether this has worked or not is highly questionable, although it is definitely the case that they have created quite a bit of ill-will by directly going after their potential customers.
When it comes to pirate and illegal download sites, networks and software, there are generally three different types:
One is the group of people who want to trade or allow for free downloads of the material because they genuinely believe that information should be free, and they consider intellectual property to be a form of information - therefore to enforce their philosophy, it is almost a moral obligation for them to build systems to allow this trading and sharing.
The second group of people share and trade for a bit more selfish reason, which is that they do it so they can also receive content, information, etc. for free. This is the main concept behind most p2p networks - people share their content and they in turn can gain access to content from other people.
The third group, however, look at this as a business model. These are the sites that offer large quantities of unlicensed, copyright-protected content to their users (usually for free, although Grooveshark is a whole different story) and financially leverage the traffic generated through ads and other promotions paid for by third parties.
One area that has specifically focused on this third type is the phenomenon of guitar tablature web sites (or other “print” content sites). Ultimate-Guitar.com, for example, continually ranks among the top five music websites - and the vast majority of its traffic has been from the unlicensed displays of tablature for copyright-protected songs. Although it has not officially announced any numbers, the site is expected to generate several million dollars of ad revenue each year - all of which goes directly to the site owners and operators.
So, for this third “advertising-supported-business” group, one question that no one seems to ask is why are advertisers continuing to support them? The answer, of course, is because this is where their potential customers are. It’s why you’ll see ads for cell-phone companies, credit cards and other products aimed at a younger late-teen to early thirties audience plastered all over ultimate-guitar.
Then again, most of these types of sites are using ad networks to get their advertising - the most popular of which is Google Adsense. But one quick look at the Google AdSense Program Policies makes it completely clear that these types of sites are not allowed to display Google Ads:
Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.”
If Google is really telling the truth here about their policies, then shouldn’t these sites be taken off the adsense network? If publishers and copyright holders are smart about this, wouldn’t it make sense to cut off the money source, at least for this third group of advertising-supported businesses that are relying on someone else’s property to make their money?
Sure, the sites could switch to other networks, but the majority of networks have the same policies. And for those that don’t, one could argue that the ad networks themselves (including Google) are directly profiting from the theft of intellectual property, since the networks also take a share of all the advertising revenue generated by their partner sites (before giving the site itself their share).
Wouldn’t that mean Google is directly profiting from the theft of intellectual property? Of course it would - but then again this seems to be the basis for most of Google’s business model (take YouTube for example). And who’s willing to take on Google?
