New battle to stop web pirates earning ad profits

Developments in the fight against online piracy suggest that the focus is moving from individual downloaders to the websites hosting the illegal content - and the advertising networks that help fund them. Earlier this month, French authorities abandoned their controversial Hadopi anti-piracy system, which sent warning letters to users accused of copyright infringement, threatening them with fines and possible disconnection from the internet. After millions of Euros were spent, few fines were issued and only one person's connection was cut - and that was only for two weeks. The French government will no longer threaten to disconnect users from the Internet. although fines are still possible for persistent pirates.
Instead, the courts are now targeting the people financially benefiting from piracy: those who run the websites that host illegal copies of songs, television Shows and films. In the UK, the Premier League has successfully won a court order requiring ISPs to block FirstRowl.eu, a Swedish site that streams football games without a licence. It is the first time a sports site has been banned. following blocks against file-sharing sites.
FirstRowl is accused of making E10 million a year by showing advertising next to the games. A spokesperson for the company told the BBC that the ban would be ineffective, because the blocking system used by ISPs is easy to circumvent (http://bbc.in/16Ifme5). With this in mind, advertising companies in the US have been pushed to take action against pirates where it will hurt them most: their bank accounts. A new agreement has been Signed by top advertising networks - including Yahoo, Google and Microsoft - that will see them expressly ban piracy sites from running their ads. However. these ad networks are mostly automated, so it's easy for a piracy site to disobey the terms.
To get around this problem, the companies have agreed to a takedown model similar to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which will provide a system for reporting pages that host pirated copy and ask for them to be removed. The agreement currently only exists in the US, but like the DMCA, it is expected to have wide-reaching repercussions, given the global nature Of the problem.

If you've been using FirstRowl- whether you knew it was illegal or not - you'll find it harder to access in the future. Similar sites that make money from illegal Streams and downloads also face being blocked. Under the current court system, once a rights owner has convinced the court that a site should be banned, WS possible to extend the order to cover others like it. Generally, such moves show how authorities and content companies are now more concerned about people uploading the content - and making money from it - rather than home users downloading it.

We think this is probably a sensible move. There are so many people who have downloaded or viewed copyrighted content that pursuing them all simply isn't practical. It's far better for companies to offer alternatives, such as legal streaming and affordable. accessible downloads. Web blocks are easily circumvented. so it makes sense to bite into pirates' revenue instead. This might not stop copyright infringement outright, but by making it more difficult and less lucrative, it will reduce the scale of the problem. This is a lesson the UK government needs to learn. Here, the Digital Economy Act is being slowly rolled out after years of delays, and part of the legislation includes the same letter-writing campaign and threat of disconnection that the French have just halted. We hope that the authorities learn from the Hadopi example, before wasting millions of pounds on measures that simply don't work.