by Ellen Seidler | Ad Sponsored Piracy, Copyright, Film, Google, Piracy
Today the Digital Citizens Alliance* released a follow-up to last year’s report that examined the connection between online piracy and advertising profits. According to results documented in today’s release, Good Money Still Going Bad, not much has changed. Tainted revenue totals from 2014 aren’t very different from 2013. The 589 websites included in the report generated 209 million dollars from advertising. This, despite the fact that many of the rogue sites included in the earlier report had been shuttered.
Google’s DoubleClick leads the way serving ads to pirate websites
With mountains of evidence that ad sponsored piracy remains a hydra with many heads, why do supposedly legit companies like Google still find themselves intimately attached to this beast? According to the report Google’s DoubleClick “ad-revenue engine” leads the pack of illicit ad service providers ( AKA-piracy enablers and profiteers). Per the report, DoubleClick was found to serve ads for 109 of the rogue sites included in the report. Adcash.com came it at number two with 63 sites.
Not only does Google continue to be a prime player in ad-sponsored piracy, but the study finds that major American brands remain hopelessly entangled as well.
There were 132 premium brands observed by MediaLink researchers on the sites, up from 89 the previous year.
Promises, promises…
YouTube also profits off ads on pirated content
Over and over again we’ve heard promises from ad industry reps that advertisers were finally going to take serious action against ad-sponsored piracy. During the summer of 2013 the White House trumpeted that the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and various companies (including Google) had “committed to a set of best practices to address online infringement by reducing the flow of ad revenue to operators of sites engaged in significant piracy and counterfeiting.”
Last summer Creative Future wrote a letter to ad industry representatives praising efforts to thwart ad-sponsored piracy and in February the same IAB made announced formation of TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group). On its website the group cites 4 areas of work which include:
Prevent advertising revenue from flowing to criminals who steal copyrighted material and place it on “pirate” sites
Budget car rental ad on streaming copy of pirate movie
Catchy acronyms and new “initiatives” are nice y’all, but when do we actually get to see results?
Yet for all the praise and press release, has any progress really been made? I’ve been writing about ad-sponsored piracy for five years and, despite much lip-service to the contrary, the online advertising industry still seems to be in pretty much the same place.
Until advertisers, and ad service providers, transform words into action, online thieves will continue make money at the expense of creators. Remember, ad money is the fuel that feeds online pirates and thieves:
Ad revenue is the oxygen that allows content theft to breathe. We know from new research by the online rights protection firm Incopro that 88% of the most popular content theft sites in Europe rely on advertising for some, if not all, revenues. Incopro called advertising the “predominant revenue source” for the top 250 unauthorized sites.
It took me only a couple seconds today to find a major brand, Budget car rental, advertising on a pirate site streaming our film. It’s worth noting that the DCA report also finds video streaming sites are a increasing threat in this illicit ecosystem:
- Video Streaming a Growing Model: As consumer appetites have shifted from downloading to streaming, content theft sites have followed suit. The number of video streaming sites in 2014 was up 40% from the original report, and revenue grew significantly due to video CPMs (cost-per-impressions) that are far higher than those for display ads. Video Streaming was the only segment to generate more revenue than the year before, even with half as many large sites. Aggregate annual revenue was up more than 50 percent. It made up 12 percent of all advertising revenue in last year’s sample. This year, it made up 21 percent.
For now it seems the mantra remains-More money for the pirate, more customers for Budget and less money for the filmmaker.
*Full disclosure, I’m a member of the Digital Citizens Alliance advisory board.
by Ellen Seidler | Film, Google, Law
Last week I sent a DMCA notice to Chilling Effects to request that the site remove a copy of a DMCA notice (sent to Google search) containing a direct link to infringing (pirated) online streams of our film. I explained my actions in an earlier blog post. This morning I published a blog post noting that I’d not received any response from Chilling Effects’ DMCA agent ([email protected]) but that the content had been removed….
Chilling Effects has the deep pockets so they’ll win this round and keeping links to pirate copies of our film (and thousands of others) online
Turns out, mere minutes after I posted by blog post, Tracy Walden, Harvard’s DMCA agent, forwarded me a counter-notice from Chilling Effects’ Adam Holland. Now, if I hope to enforce the takedown I must file suit in district court. Apparently my DMCA notice falls into the category of “mistaken removal.”
Here’s how Chilling Effects describes the counter-notice process on its own site:
While the safe harbor provisions provide a way for individuals to object to the removal of their materials once taken down, they do not require service providers to notify those individuals before their allegedly infringing materials are removed. If the material on your site does not infringe the intellectual property rights of a copyright owner and it has been improperly removed from the Web, you can file a counter-notice with the service provider, who must transmit it to the person who made the complaint. If the copyright owner does not notify the service provider within 14 business days that it has filed a claim against you in court, your materials can be restored to the Internet.
I don’t have the deep pockets required to go to court so it’s likely that after a couple weeks the pirate links will go back online. As I’m not an attorney it’s not entirely clear to me why Chilling Effects–a site that in its current form operates as a de facto search engine for pirate links–is allowed to operate above the law. I’m sure, however, there will be plenty of folks who will fill me in.
Just to be clear, here’s a video documenting how the page in question at Chilling Effects links directly to an infringing stream of our film. I guess my eyes deceive me eh?
For the record, I’m not opposed to Chilling Effects operating a database to document DMCA takedowns. Transparency is a good thing. However, I do believe the site could, and should, redact a portion of the infringing links posted on its public, searchable database. That would be the responsible (and ethical) thing to do.
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Film, Google, Law, Piracy
Chilling Effects reposts infringing links removed from Google. Why no consequences?
Earlier this week I sent Chilling Effects a DMCA takedown notice*, requesting that the site remove links that lead directly to a pirated stream of our film, And Then Came Lola. How did the pirate link make its way to Chilling Effects? Well, it’s not a new tale. In fact, I’ve repeatedly written about the fact that pirate links reported (and removed) by Google search are routinely reposted on Chilling Effects. Google even goes so far as to provide a direct link to the notice (and the infringing links) so as not to inconvenience its users.
In the short video clip below I document just how quickly–and easily–it was to navigate from Google to Chilling Effects to the illegal, embedded stream of our film. It took me a mere 10 seconds to complete the journey from Google-to Chilling Effects-to the illegal stream of our film.
I sent the original DMCA notice to Google on April 23, 2015 and two weeks later, the pirate links were reborn via a posted copy of DMCA notice sent to Google, courtesy of Chilling Effects. How Chilling Effects can get away with this behavior is beyond me, but I imagine the legal staff at the Berkman Center at Harvard, my alma mater, are careful to operate within the confines—if not the intent–of the DMCA’s “safe harbor” provision.
It’s worth noting that in order to be protected by safe harbor, site operators must comply with the following requirements (via Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press):
These safe harbor provisions could provide valuable protection to you as a web site operator. In order to take advantage of them, however, you must comply with three administrative requirements:
- You must designate an agent, usually yourself though it may be someone else who agrees to do so, to receive notices of claimed copyright infringement. Your agent must provide up-to-date contact information so that copyright owners who believe their work is being infringed on your site can send complaints or take-down notices to him or her. To designate an agent, a procedural requirement for protection under the DMCA safe harbor provisions, you must file an interim designation with the U.S. Copyright Office and submit a $105 filing fee.
- You must publish on your site your policy for addressing repeated infringing activity, specifically a statement that you terminate users or account holders who are repeat infringers. If you have no subscribers or account holders, your policy may state, “If we become aware that one of our users is a repeat copyright infringer, it is our policy to take reasonable steps within our power to terminate that user.” Including the policy statement in the web site’s terms of service or privacy agreements makes logical sense, though it may be published elsewhere on the site.
- You must properly comply with a notice of claimed infringement when received, including
- the expeditious removal of the material that is claimed to be infringing;
- notification to the user or subscriber that the material has been removed;
- notification to the copyright holder if proper counter-notice is provided by the user or subscriber; and
- restoration of the removed material if proper counter-notice is provided, and the copyright holder does not file suit within 10 days.
Why doesn’t Chilling Effects make it easy to find email address to send takedown notices to?
Prior to sending my DMCA notice to the good people at Chilling Effects, I attempted to searc
h the site for an email address to send the notice to. When I couldn’t find one even after searching Google using the terms–chilling effects “DMCA agent”— I resorted to sending my notice to the only email listed on the site’s about page, [email protected].*
Update 5-8-15: Today, after receiving no response to my original notice, I forwarded a copy to the Berkman Center For Internet & Society. Shortly thereafter I received an email with a link to Chilling Effects legal policies page (https://www.chillingeffects.org/pages/legal). Of course, that was not the end of my journey. In order to get the actual email for CE’s acting DMCA agent I had to click another link (http://www.harvard.edu/reporting-copyright-infringements) and visit yet another website–this one a copyright infringement page hosted by Harvard University at Harvard.edu. Note that the Harvard page includes this verbiage:
In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), Pub. L. 105-304, Harvard has designated an agent to receive notification of alleged copyright infringement occurring in the harvard.edu domain. If you believe that your copyrighted work is being infringed, notify our designated agent specified below.
Hmmm, so I guess, technically, ChillingEffects.org is actually a Harvard.edu domain? Color me confused. Not exactly an efficient– nor transparent–way for Chilling Effects to inform people about its own DMCA takedown process.
Chilling Effects obfuscation of its own DMCA agent information is ironic given its mission is to make the takedown process transparent. Why, when it comes to its own site, do they hinder user’s ability to lawfully protect their copyrighted work from online pirates?
Chilling Effects is an independent 3rd party research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content. We collect and analyze complaints about online activity, especially requests to remove content from online. Our goals are to educate the public, to facilitate research about the different kinds of complaints and requests for removal–both legitimate and questionable–that are being sent to Internet publishers and service providers, and to provide as much transparency as possible about the “ecology” of such notices, in terms of who is sending them and why, and to what effect.
Perhaps those who work at Chilling Effects (and the lawyers who advise them) believe that the database’s work falls outside that of the “service providers” as defined by the DMCA.
Until someone with deep pockets can take them to task, Chilling Effects is apparently quite willing to create its own ecology, above the law, where pirate links are reborn and disseminated. The Chilling Effects database may be used for legitimate research, but in its current form, it also gives users one of the most efficient piracy search engines around.
*Update: Today, Friday, May 8th I forwarded my DMCA notice to [email protected] which apparently serves as the DMCA agent for Chilling Effects.
by Ellen Seidler | Ad Sponsored Piracy, Copyright, Film, Piracy
Facebook doesn’t give a damn whose ad goes where, so long as it means more cash in its pocket
If ever you needed more evidence to show just how irresponsible problem online advertising has become–or how totally tone deaf and blind Silicon Valley is-look no further than Facebook. Yet again, a Silicon Valley king is caught red-handed–yet again–profiting from online movie piracy.
Take a look below at the Facebook page for a notorious pirate site, Solarmovie. Not only does Solarmovie–with its 15,000+ likes–get to openly share hundreds of links to pirated movies, but Facebook–in an absurdly ironic twist–plops a paid advertisement promoting the MPAA website The Credits right alongside.
The Credits was a website designed to “to highlight the creative work that goes into making film and television,” but I can’t imagine that promotional (or educational) partnerships with online pirates was part of the plan. I understand that keywords are part of product placement, but this situation takes the cake for absurdity.
Of course in an ideal world the would-be pirates would notice the MPAA ad, visit The Credits website, and be transformed by reading the stories of all those who work behind-the-scenes to create the movies we love….but we don’t live an ideal world and the people visiting this FB page are there for one purpose, to find links to stolen movies. How exactly will the advertising “team” at Facebook explain why Hollywood’s ad dollars seem to be supporting the very pirates laying waste to its worker bees?
Of course Facebook, like its Silicon Valley brethren, cares little for the livelihoods of those working outside its realm and so continue to blithely pile up profits, redefining theft as innovation.
Facebook page promoting pirate website provides direct links to full copies of pirated movies
The other unfortunate fact is that there’s no way for me to report this page and get it removed from Facebook for its blatant illegal activity. Sure, I can report the link it posted to an illegal stream of my own movie, but ultimately doesn’t give a damn about me, or any other creator just so long as that cash keeps on a coming…
by Ellen Seidler | Ad Sponsored Piracy, Copyright, Film, Google, Law, Piracy
When searching for this film’s official website Google search instead lists a notorious pirate site at #1. It links to a full, illegal stream of the movie.
Google’s promise to fight piracy on its search engine is pure baloney
Click the #1 result and immediately you’ll find a full stream of our film
I was updating my film’s website earlier this week and so randomly went to Google to see where it would show up in search results. I figured that, given it’s the official website for the film, it would be at or near the top of the results. Boy was I wrong…When I used in the search terms And Then Came Lola website the first result was a pirate site offering pirated streams of the film with a single click. In fact, the actual website for our film was nowhere to be found. Instead the first page of results included several sites that featured pirated streams of our film.
Yeah Google, you’re surely doing everything you can to fight online piracy aren’t you?
Google’s convoluted web takedown DMCA form requires 8 steps
Google moves pirate links to a safe haven on the Chilling Effects database
I guess it’s time to visit that handy dandy DMCA online takedown form that Google–so graciously–makes creators whose work is stolen use. Of course, in order to get to the DMCA page, one must click through 7 pages of crap, then login to Google, before–at last– filling out a tedious online form, It would, of course, be much more efficient to send an email (since I already have DMCA template set up) but let’s face it, Google has NO desire (nor incentive) to make the process an easy one.
In the meantime, maybe the good folks at Google responsible for fine-tuning search algorithms to downgrade pirate sites in search results need to go back to the drawing board. Remember this B.S?
We aim to provide a great experience for our users and have developed over 200 signals to ensure our search algorithms deliver the best possible results. Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily
At the bottom of the first pages of search results Google offers users these suggestions for finding (pirated) copies of the film online
Google search results not only put a pirate result in first place, but at the bottom of the page offer these handy suggested search phrases that also offer ways find illegal streams or downloads of my film.
BTW the pirate site solarmovie (and its ever-changing cornucopia of domain suffixes) that pops up #1 IS a notorious pirate host, impervious to any direct DMCA requests. It’s been reported thousands of times to Google….Why does it still end up as a #1 result??? If this is punishing pirate sites one can only wonder what praising them would look like?
Google forces me to acknowledge that they will send my DMCA to Chilling Effects so that the pirate link will live in despite my efforts
Google’s search DMCA takedown process is a joke
Of course, even after I go to ALL the trouble of requesting that Google remove the links it won’t disappear. In a nifty sleight of hand the Google team will simply move it to Chilling Effects so that users can still easily find the pirated stream(s) online. This entire DMCA takedown scheme is a fraud makes a mockery of the DMCA and destroys creators’ ability to protect their work from online theft. Recently the USPTO organized a working group comprised creators and service providers to address inefficiencies in the DMCA takedown process. This past Tuesday the group released its findings in a document, “DMCA Notice-and-Takedown Processes”. While it could be considered progress that the various parties are talking, there’s still plenty of evidence that the DMCA is badly the broken and due for a major overhaul.
Here’s a sneak peek of Part II of this (never-ending) story illustrating how Google’s search suggestions, mentioned above, also point directly to stolen (pirated) copies of my movie.
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Film, Law, Piracy, Tech
PayPal has finally ceased doing business with Kim Dotcom’s Mega site and he’s pouting about it. The man who has made millions be monetizing content stolen from others continues to assert that Mega is a legit cloud-based service and that its operations are legal. A statement posted on the site announcing that, “PayPal has ceased processing MEGA customer payments effective immediately…” also makes the claim that the cyberlocker site is being unfairly targeted:
MEGA has demonstrated that it is as compliant with its legal obligations as USA cloud storage services operated by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, Box, Spideroak etc, but PayPal has advised that MEGA’s “unique encryption model” presents an insurmountable difficulty. The encryption models claimed by various USA and other entities apparently do not represent any problem to PayPal or the parties behind PayPal.
Nice try but even if you dress a wolf in sheep’s clothing he’s still just a wolf. It’s important to note that Mega rose from the ashes of Megaupload, the granddaddy of cyberlockers where the piracy for profit model was perfected and later copied by dozens of other online entrepreneurial thieves. 
After the feds shut the site down in January of 2012, Dotcom got busy working a better way to circumvent copyright law and a year later launched a more nefarious piracy for profit site named Mega. The site uses encryption technology to protect its users (and site operators) from prying eyes. Dotcom claims Mega is full of folks’ baby pictures and the like, but in reality its business model continues to provide pirates with a profitable, and protected, haven for their transactions.
Until PayPal’s recent departure, officials at Mega even pointed to the relationship with the payment processor as a sign that Mega was “legit.” In response to charges in a study published last September by NetNames and the Digital Citizens Alliance, Mega CEO Graham Gaylard told TorrentFreak:
“We consider the report grossly untrue and highly defamatory of Mega…Mega has been accepted by PayPal because we were able to show that we are a legitimate cloud storage site. Mega has a productive and respected relationship with PayPal, demonstrating the validity of Mega’s business…”
For the past few years payment processors like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal have come under increasing scrutiny for their role in facilitating (and profiting from) pirate-linked transactions. Following publication of the NetNames study, Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, sent letters to the head of both Mastercard and Visa urging that the companies sever ties with piracy operations.
I’ve been reporting on this issue since 2010, and while some progress has been made as processors have severed ties with many of the worst offenders, much work remains. According to the study, PayPal was singled out for its business dealings with Dotcom:
PayPal was offered as payment option on only one site (Mega). This represents a major change in the cyberlocker universe compared to just three years ago. The fact that the vast majority of cyberlocker sites do not attempt to take PayPal through hidden or disguised means demonstrates that the payment method is not even considered as an option for accepting subscription payments.
Dropvideo still depends on PayPal
Apparently PayPal officials finally decided that doing business with Mega was no longer an option. Unfortunately, aside from Mega, PayPal’s involvement with pirate sites persists and extends beyond offering subscribers a way to pay for services.
PayPal remains an important cog in the the flow of money that’s central to the business model Dotcom perfected on Megaupload. It was essentially a pyramid scheme as I explained in this blog post from 2011. Basically, cyberlocker affiliates provide the fuel that drive the piracy machine. Individuals sign who up to be cyberlocker affiliates earn money for uploading (stolen) content based on the number of times a file was downloaded. They can also earn commissions for attracting other to enroll in various cyberlocker account offerings. Affiliate payments continue to be the lifeblood that sustain the cyberlocker eco-system and PayPal continues a popular means for affiliates to receive payment for their role in bringing traffic to sites. According to the NetNames report:
…PayPal is still used by some sites for affiliate or reward scheme payments. Of the thirteen sites that offered an affiliate scheme, eight (61.5 percent) offered PayPal as a way for affiliates to receive their payments (other online payment systems such as WebMoney and Payza were also used but PayPal was the most popular).
This morning I took a quick look at Dropvideo.com, a cyberlocker I’d recently sent DMCA notices to. Sure enough, they use PayPal for their affiliate payments. So while PayPal has distanced itself from Mega, the company still has a long way to go to clean up its dirty piracy profits.
Today the Digital Citizens Alliance* released a follow-up to last year’s report that examined the connection between online piracy and advertising profits. According to results documented in today’s release, Good Money Still Going Bad, not much has changed. Tainted revenue totals from 2014 aren’t very different from 2013. The 589 websites included in the report generated 209 million dollars from advertising. This, despite the fact that many of the rogue sites included in the earlier report had been shuttered.
