Google Proposes Fighting Piracy By Blocking Ad Money 202
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?"
Re:Dunno, might help but not solve problem (Score:5, Insightful)
But it won't faze ThePirateBay in the least. Until somebody can come up with a solution to that one,
I wasn't aware ThePirateBay was a "problem"?
Don't all pirates have adblockers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since all pirates have adblockers, doesn't that make the proposal irrelevant?
Re:Dunno, might help but not solve problem (Score:2, Insightful)
TPB runs ads -- how do you conclude cutting off ads revenue won't hurt them?
As for people walking about with a complete music library, that's just delusional; a typical song at high quality is 5 MB, a typical album is 10 songs, or 50 MB, so a 64 GB device can only hold 1000 albums. That's about 6 months' worth of the US & UK output alone. Quibble with my numbers if you like, but there's no way your getting two orders of magnitude out of that.
Re:Dunno, might help but not solve problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Piracy is driven, solely, by the media industry that's complaining about it. They could end it tomorrow if they wanted to. But they have this rediculous pipe dream that the internet will lead to them cutting costs by not having to produce physical copies of their media any longer, but at the same time they can raise the price of that very same media. Sorry, that's not going to happen guys. It's 2012, time to get a clue.
Re:Dunno, might help but not solve problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we? Where do you take your data from?
Personal experience from both sides of the debate - as a former warez user who paid lip service to "Try Before Buy", but now works with an ISV (Independent Software Vendor, if you don't know what it means ...).
The research financed by the big labels? Maybe the same research that generated this
No. These mega-corporations are lying to us, that's obvious.
Working for an ISV helped me realise that downloading and using software from small indie developers without paying for it benefits no one but myself. It certainly doesn't benefit the indie developer in any way!
Nothing sinister. No **AA involved. Just honest, hard working developers with a passion for building products that help people get things done. In the case of these ISV's there generally isn't the luxury of running an international cartel dedicated to screwing over the rights of artists and consumers. We know that piracy hurts our business - at least to a certain extent - but that seems to be lost on people who consider anyone with a website and products to sell to be in the same league as $$MEGA_CORPORATION$$.
Peace,
Andy.
Re:Dunno, might help but not solve problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, you can't fool us into believing that the problem is some imaginary $300 / month subscription fee - we know that pirates are the problem.
The false dichotomy here is thinking only one of them can be the problem. Clearly they have a problem with people whose sole reason for piracy is to save money, whether it's cheapskates who pirate when they can and buy when they must or freeloaders who wouldn't pay anyway, but demoralizes the paying customers - why should they pay when the freeloaders don't. Because of that they're implementing copying restrictions and DRM systems and region codes, annoying unskippable warnings which is also abused for trailers and commercials, pushing for mass surveillance, three/six strike laws that lack judicial oversight and mass shakedowns that are economically impossible to defend against, carry excessive penalties (thousands of dollars for one 99 cent song) and so on.
That pisses a lot of other people off, people who like to run a media server like me. People that run Linux like I did, not anymore but that's a different story. People that have a laptop with no optical drive which they feel they should be able to watch it on. People that feel once they have bought it, they should be able to convert it to watch on their phone or tablet. People that don't like them poking their noses in all private communication. People that don't like kangaroo courts. People that are afraid they'll get a thousands of dollar lawsuit because their wifi was open or their machine was hacked or their tenants or relatives was on P2P. On top of that particularly the TV and movie industry cling to an outdated business model which makes the pirate service far more convenient.
You have a problem with pirates? Well, the feeling is mutual because I have a problem with you because I would like to pay but there's nothing worth paying for. You've made your content so locked up and difficult to access and use as I want that the pirates win without a fight. The service I want you're not willing to offer to me for any price. Your current efforts are futile and the totalitarian society you'd have to build to stomp out piracy is not one I'd care to live in. As far as I'm concerned you're a hindrance to my enjoyment and a menace to society and the best way of neutralizing you would be to take your copyright away. If people want you to continue creating, they'll pay. If not then find some other work. It's not the perfect solution but getting rid of copyright is the lesser evil, you're the greater.
Re:Also: Fighting Unpopular Opinions (Score:5, Insightful)
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'
Re:Dunno, might help but not solve problem (Score:4, Insightful)
certainly not enough to justify the witch hunting US and its aligned countries have been practicing against end users.
So there are a couple of problems with what you said. First, there's no data to perfectly prove a relationship between downloads and selling losses because we can't test this in a vacuum, with two perfectly equally desirably products where one can be pirated and the other can't. So you're always basing stuff on estimates, which means any argument will eventually boil down to you saying "you can't prove that was a lost sale" and the other guy saying "the effect is statistically significant, we're just sure exactly how much, but that makes a bad sound bite so I simplified it", Secondly of course is that there's a lot of piracy from places you can't sell to, or don't try and sell in (think china). I was working with an indie game dev and they figured half of their piracy was from china etc. type places where they can't sell the game anyway, so that's clearly not a loss.
Where you run into problem is that you're assuming that the 'witch hunting' isn't in the end a necessary evil. All laws ultimately limit freedoms and privacy to try and investigate crime, and all laws can, indirectly, destroy someones life even when it's not dangerously criminal (think doping in sports, or sports gambling by athletes). Software piracy undermines the industry of people creating software to try and sell. Making a copy of a book costs next to nothing compared to the cost of writing the first copy, but we still want there to be authors, and you can't expect book to be published solely by people who have some other job that pays the bills. I think most reasonable people agree there should be laws to prevent theft for example, but of course 'piracy' isn't exactly theft, and nor is counter fitting, so then we're trying to find the sweet spot between letting people own the work they did long enough to get paid enough to justify the time they spent making it versus letting everyone benefit from knowledge and hoping that some socialist utopia will come along that will pay people for whatever they do somehow. In the digital era when a 'counter fit' copy can be a perfect copy of the original you run headlong into an extreme example of a problem we've had for as long as we've been making things, who gets credit for making the first pointy stick so to speak?
All in all apparently the great majority of people do not think piracy is wrong, and considering we are living in Democratic countries last time I checked
That's a dangerous statement. Tyranny of the masses and all that. I'm sure Bill Gates house is nicer than yours, but you can't just move into it for the fun of it. You might actually be able to make a copy though, because the act of making the copy is the primary value of the house.
The value of the production of knowledge is what keeps the entertainment industry going, and basically all of academia. But they have completely different business models. In academia the government pays for information to be mostly free and mostly public (or thereabouts), and it gets the money for this by taxing people like you, to pay people like me. In the entertainment business they try and find some way to sell you an experience (live performance, theatre, the content itself on a disk or on paper), and that justifies the creation of new content. Without some financial incentive to create content no one can do so. The pirate argument with music is that the radio etc. are actually just ads for live performances, ok fair enough, I'm not sure it's true, but that's a valid business model. There isn't any obvious business model for Books or TV/Movies or Video games other than ads, and those create their own slew of problems. Your mileage may vary, but I'd rather the business model involve paying for content and not have to have it filled with ads than the reverse (and I will point out that in the reverse scenario rather than trying to find ways to du