Row Brews Over P2P Advertising

KennyMillar writes "BBC News Online is reporting that advertisers are starting to place ads on P2P networks, because they are so popular. But the owners of paid-for download services are accusing them of "providing 'oxygen' for companies that support illegal downloading.""

Router Host Blocking

[Anonymous Coward]

I upgraded my wrt54g to a newer firmware and one of the features in the it has host blocking. I simply added a list of advertisers to the router block. The first one added was doubleclick.net. Mass advertisging I guess will have to be distributed rather than a single company or I will contiue to block single point companies.

And you thought the trojans and spyware were bad..

[BalorTFL]

...wait until the ads start popping up. Unwanted advertising seems to infect every aspect of our lives. On the other hand, is this a sign that P2P is gradually becoming legitimatized? If major companies start promoting their products on your favorite P2P program, then perhaps the **IA will be less inclined to sue. We can only hope...

Re:FP

[RichDice]

Now if they started inserting ad breaks into a film I downloaded that may be a different matter.

They do. It's called "product placement." E.g. ever notice how (almost) every computer ever shown in movie or TV show is a Mac?

Cheers,
Richard

"support illegal downloading' my ass

[nurb432]

The last thing I got via a P2P network was a free application for BSD.. Which was copyrighted of course..

Don't see anything illegal with that.

The last MP3 I got, was from a band sponsored website ' please download these and do what you want with them , share them.. burn them.. and if you like it come back and buy our album " Their music is ALSO copyrighted..

Enough with the 'its all copyright piracy' arguments already..

And this doesnt even touch the argument that even downloading 'restricted' media may actually be legal anyway in many cases, regardless of what the RIAA/MPAA thinks..

Obvious solution

[ajs]

So the obvious solution is for media companies and studios to start building P2P broadcast stations that produce such high-quality entertainment that a) it can generate huge ad revenues and b) it drowns out the illegal stuff... right?

Why they should do this:

1. They're not restricted in terms of media. They can ship any audio, video, text, software, etc. media that the "viewers" can open.
2. They have a leg-up on illegal files because they can provide several stable download points (perhaps even using something like Akamai) that make their files faster to download.
3. There is no uplink lag
4. Uplink equipment cost is trivial by comparison with a broadcast or even cable station.
5. Ad revenues can be tied to more reliable measures of the viewer base than with broadcast or television. Neilsen would love this, as would advertisers.
6. You get to leap-frog HDTV and go to better digital formats long before HDTV telvisions have saturated the market.

There are more, subtler advantages, but I think any Hollywood MBA worth is diploma should be able to see them.

Pfff

[SmallFurryCreature]

What is this guy smoking? The music industry got its head so far up its ass they just can't see that the world has changed.

Not that I ever seen big companies put ads on P2P sites but if they do it is a sure sign that the music industry is now considered worthy of being ripped off by both consumers and other industries.

Lets face it. File sharing is good business. ISP's and telecoms make money off it. Recordable CD/DVD makers earn from every burned game/movie/cd. Burner makers profit. HD makers profit. Modem makers profit. Cable companies making the cables being rolled out to support our ever increasing data needs profit. Streetmakers profit because cables go underground.

Everybody is making money of filesharing except the music industry and now even totally unrelated industries are finding ways to make a buck out of it. It makes sense for a mobile phone company to advertise to music file sharers. Kids who don't spend money on overpriced cd's DO spend it on SMS packages.

Music industry wake up. Nobody likes you or your product. Get with the times or die. When the first cars arrived I bet the horse industry held similar pleas and nobody cared back then either.

Want to beat filesharing? I got a very simple solution. Get rid of pre-pressed cd's. Put 1 big central computer in each record labels basement wich contains all their songs ever recorded. Put smaller computers hooked up to the net in each point of sale. Give it a few terrabyte cache with the best sellers. Put up several terminals for people to browse the catalogs and sample songs. On request burn or upload selected songs to the buyer. Songs in the cache cost no extra bandwidth and HD space is cheap. Songs downloaded cost peanuts.

Every point of sale will have an infinite stock and be able to sell to every type of music lover. No longer problems with over or understocking. No stolen cd cases.

A simple business model and one the point of sales people love. They have been suggesting this for a long time and several have tried.

But the music industry doesn't want it. It prefers to cling on to the old model. Some horse cart makers turned to making horseless carriages and survived, some didn't. Do we really care about the losers?

Re:Router Host Blocking

[steve6534]

Another easier was would be to simply blackhole the hostnames in your hosts file. (/etc/hosts in *nix or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in widows). Just use the format of : 0.0.0.0 doubleclick.net This will prevent these sites from being contacted

Bigger Mouth Than It Deserves?

[Tetsugaku-San]

Another example of the entertainment industry having a bigger mouth than it deserves.

Just how the hell do they manage to shout so LOUDLY!! The games industry is worth ten times that of the movie industry, yet we never hear the gaming companies moning that P2P has taken away 85% of their business unlike the whinging pathetic record labels and movie houses

Screw em, the sooner the big 5 record labels and God knows how many hooooge movie companies go bust and leave room for the small inovative, value for money quality establishments the better.

Re:And you thought the trojans and spyware were ba

[maxwell demon]

Well, it will really get interesting when you get advertising built into your operating system.

Your printer is out of paper. A dialog pops up:

Printer out of paper. New paper to insanely low prices at xxxxxxxxx. Click Ok to visit our web page.

You open the system control folder. Before showing your files, it tells you:

Having trouble with your computer? Check out out fine computer books at xxxxxxxxxxx. Click here to visit our web page.

You start writing a letter. A window opens:

Writing a business letter? Buy xxxxxxxxx's Business Letter Assistant, and be more productive and more successful! Click here!

Re:And you thought the trojans and spyware were ba

[Nogami_Saeko]

Well, this already happens to some degree - when my Epson printer gets low on, or runs out of ink.

A dialog will appear with a "Clink Here to Buy Ink" button, which oddly enough, takes you right to the Epson online store...

N.