The Continuing Rise of Piracy and You (via Plagiarism Today)
Last week, NetNames released a study about the size of the piracy universe and it painted a bleak picture about both the amount of copyright infringement taking place and the growth of it. The study looked at three regions, North America, Europe and…
Ad industry executives were out in force this week at the annual “Advertising Week” convention in New York City. Not surprisingly, the issue of digital piracy’s link to advertising dollars was raised during a panel discussion “Digital Media Under Attack-It’s Worse Than You Thought.” Privacy-net’s Gordon Platt reported on the event:
Much of the conversation focused on the relationship between advertising and piracy, not unexpected for an Advertising Week event. “No one has asked the blunt question of whether you want your ad associated with a pirate site,” said [Rick] Cotton. He added, “Advertisers should not want their ads to be in that environment. It’s getting more risky to be in business with criminal websites.”
Bob Liodice, CEO of ANA (Association of National Advertisers) agreed and suggested the industry needs to be accountable for its role in monetizing piracy.
“It makes us all shake our heads, wondering how we can wrap our arms around this. We have theft going on here.” Liodice believes that one problem is that no one has taken “ownership” of the piracy problem. “We have to create a level of collaboration in order for the [advertising] industry to own the issue.” Liodice stressed that collaboration has to be “systematized” and that the industry has to make it “personal.”
Part of making it “personal” is for advertisers take responsibility for where their ads appear. Unfortunately, this is an issue that extends beyond advertising on rogue sites offshore. Ad sponsored piracy is also ubiquitous on so-called legitimate, U.S. based websites like YouTube and Facebook.
Let’s take a look at YouTube first. Thanks to ad revenue, the popular UGC (user-generated content) site is a cash cow for Google and (some) content creators. Advertisers of all stripes are eager to see their products plastered over the latest in viral videos. There are four basic types of ad placements available:
The question real question is do advertisers know where their money is going and do they care? What determines which ad goes where and how much it will cost? YouTube explains it this way:
Monetized YouTube videos may display ads served via the AdSense auction as well as ads sold on a reservation basis via DoubleClick (DCLK) and other YouTube-sold sources.
AdSense Ads
The Adsense ads displayed on your video are determined automatically by our system based on a number of contextual factors relating to your video. These factors include but are not limited to your video metadata and how you categorize your video.
We aren’t able to control all of the ads that appear with your videos manually. Similarly, we can’t guarantee that specific ads will be displayed with your videos. We regularly monitor and update our content-targeting algorithms in order to deliver the most relevant ads to your video pages.
Like most things YouTube, it’s not particularly clear, but for advertisers who don’t want to miss out on eyeballs this lack of transparency seems not to be of much concern. Here’s a cross-section of “overlay” ads that represent a variety of companies that I found plastered on videos linking to pirated content.
YouTube isn’t alone. As I’ve reported in past blog posts, Facebook advertisers also routinely have their ads placed side by side with pirate offerings.
Facebook’s explanation of its ad placement and targeting options is fairly simplistic too:
Choose the location, gender, age, likes and interests, relationship status, workplace and education of your target audience. If you are the admin of a Facebook Page, event or app, you can also target your ad to people who are already connected to you.
Clearly the ad placement is dependent on who is looking at the page rather than the page content itself. That needs to change.
During the Advertising Week event NBCUniversal’s Senior Counselor for IP Protection, Rick Cotton suggested, ““The simple message is that we need a systematic approach to this problem. Otherwise it’s bad news for the industry.” Very true.
Why not start with cleaning up our own back yard in Silicon Valley? If advertisers were to stop advertising on sites like YouTube and Facebook until they can be sure their ads aren’t associated with pirated content I imagine things would change rather quickly. After all, money talks…
When people talk about DMCA abuse it’s usually folks representing companies like Google or the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Time and time again this red herring is used as a cudgel to attack those who believe in copyright law. However, as I’ve pointed out numerous times, if one really wants to examine the law and its potential for abuse it’s worthwhile to explain why Google and the EFF have it backwards.
Bottom line, if an erroneous DMCA is sent all the recipient really needs to do to stop enforcement is to file a “counter-claim.” Unless sender of the DMCA wants to spend money to go to court to enforce their rights, that’s it, end of the story. This is why the characterization of who is “damaged” should be reversed.
Let me show you an example that I recently uncovered that demonstrates my point. French indie filmmaker Celine Sciamma’s 2011 film “Tomboy” was uploaded to YouTube on July 13th of this year (all 122 minutes) At the time the film’s U.S. distributor, a small independent company, matched the infringing content via Content ID on YouTube and issued a DMCA “takedown” in order to remove the infringing copy from the site. The uploader, who goes by the YouTube user name “Dirceu Alves” filed a “counter-claim” with YouTube saying he had the right to upload the film.
At this point, regardless of the fact the YouTube user filed an false counter-notice, per U.S. law, the only option remaining for the distributor to enforce the takedown is spend money and seek a court order against the uploader:
If the subscriber serves a counter notification complying with statutory requirements, including a statement under penalty of perjury that the material was removed or disabled through mistake or misidentification, then unless the copyright owner files an action seeking a court order against the subscriber [emphasis added],the service provider must put the material back up within 10-14 business days after receiving the counter notification.
Perhaps, because he appears to live in Brazil, Dirceu Alves isn’t too worried about being charged with perjury. Note YouTube’s instructions for filing a counter-claim to a DMCA notice:
A counter notification is a legal request for YouTube to reinstate a video that has been removed for alleged copyright infringement. The process may only be pursued in instances where the upload was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled, such as fair use. It should not be pursued under any other circumstances. [emphasis added]
Despite the fact this YouTube user does not own rights to this film in the United States (or anywhere), because its indie distributor doesn’t have deep pockets to fight the matter in court, the pirated movie remains online. Now, if the distributor tries to remove the pirated film, this is the notification from YouTube that appears:
According to a graphic overlaid at the beginning of the pirated film, the pirated copy originates from a Brazilian-based pirate website (offering illegal downloads). There’s also a companion Twitter account and Facebook Page as well. It’s not clear whether the YouTube account holder is one in the same, but the upload’s links to online piracy are obvious.
So, for all the hoopla surrounding DMCA abuse, maybe it’s time to look at who’s really damaged when the law is used under false circumstances–content creators who have limited resources to protect their work and their rights. As I wrote in an earlier post on this blog:
…if one takes the time to read the DMCA, it’s easy to see that the law actually favors the reported party, not the other way around. If online content has been removed in error, the owner can file a counter-claim. That immediately puts the onus on the party that filed the original DMCA request to go to court and prove the legitimacy of their claim. If that next step isn’t taken, the takedown becomes moot. Filing a court case is a costly endeavor so it’s unlikely that those whose file false DMCA claims, whether in error or purposely, would bother to spend money to enforce a bogus DMCA. Conversely, those content creators who don’t have deep pockets have little recourse when it comes to enforcing a valid DMCA takedown if the other party, representing an infringing (pirate) website, chooses to file a counter-claim.
There’s been a lot of breaking news lately about online piracy. This past week, two new studies were released that document the scope of online piracy and search engines’ role in leading consumers to infringing content. Yet there’s another area, in addition to search, that should be drawing more scrutiny–the role that social media sites like Facebook play in leading consumers to illegal downloads.
I’ve blogged about Facebook’s link to piracy in the past, but today came across a Facebook page promoting pirated content that has 1.3 Million “Likes.” The page also features advertising from entities like the Oklahoma Department of Commerce , Coach Handbags, and Petco. Apparently Facebook has no problem collecting tainted income from advertisers who likely have no clue that their ads are adjacent to a pages linking to pirated movies.
I found this particular Facebook page when I happened upon a pirate website, “Filmes Online Gratis” (Films Online Free) while researching illegal streams to a colleague’s film. It’s a Brazilian site (Portuguese language) that offers more than 393 pages of streams for pirated movies and TV shows. The site also features a link promoting its companion Facebook page that, as of today, apparently has 1,305,449 “likes.”
This pirate website promotes its offerings via a companion Facebook page
I checked several of the movies featured on the site and found that the infringing streams were indeed active. Of course this particular pirate entrepreneur’s business model, like the majority of them, is based on earning revenue from advertising so its pages–and the embedded streams — are plastered with ads. The infringing streams are hosted via a variety of sites known for offering pirated content including the Russian Facebook wannabe Vk.com and a favorite pirate cyberlocker site, Putlocker.
What’s troubling is that the Filmes Online Gratis Facebook Page also features direct links to these same pages (and infringing streams). Spin it any way you like, but the fact is, Facebook is profiting from, and helping promote, pirated content.
Its Silicon Valley neighbor, Google, has been under (justifiable) scrutiny for its connection to the pirate economy; now it’s time to hold Facebook accountable. One should also take note that in terms of this pirate’s FB page, Facebook doesn’t share any of its ad revenue with the pirate–the company gets to keep all its dirty money for itself (and its shareholders). For Facebook, ad income on this page = pure piracy profit.
Last April, when I attempted to get a response from Facebook about this issue for an earlier blog post, this is the email response (see below) I ultimately received. I’ll try to contact them again, but I would guess that not much will have have changed since my last effort to communicate, save for the price of its stock.
Seems a tad disingenuous to “prohibit” activity, yet do nothing about it. This Filmes Online Gratis Facebook page didn’t get to 1.3 million followers overnight. One can only guess how much advertising income Facebook has earned from its visitors.
Like other companies whose business models profit from piracy (search engines, ad servers, payment processors, etc.) Facebook’s lack of response adheres to the popular “Three Wise Monkeys” principle of corporate PR-hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. By the way, there is a fourth monkey from the proverb–the often forgotten Shizaru—who symbolizes “do no evil.”
Ironically that particular phrase is a well-known part of Google’s corporate code of conduct that reads, in part, “…it’s [do no evil] also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably…”
While I wouldn’t characterize Google’s corporate behavior as being particularly “honorable,” at least the company acknowledges on some level that online piracy is a problem. The time for Facebook to pull its head out of the sand and do the same is long overdue. Playing ostrich will only work for so long.
(original images credit: iStock)
Practical Lessons from the MPAA’s Search Engine Study (via Plagiarism Today)
In recent months, Google’s role in the piracy ecosystem has been hotly debated. Much of it started with Ellen Seidler’s Popup Pirates site (Note: She has since moved to Vox Indie) which attacked what she saw as Google’s role in supporting piracy…
