This was spotted Wednesday afternoon by David Lowery, who snapped this very unfortunate screenshot. “Artists pay TuneCore to distribute their albums and music on paid platforms, and Tunecore pays pirate site 4Shared to give the artists music away for free,” Lowery summed-up on The Trichordist.
that song sucks Paul.
Such great real estate, apologies I couldn’t resist. Who knows perhaps the virulent tech boys and incessant Spotify Supporter(s) will join me here.
I’ve been called many things in this thread, so I thought I’d share an excerpt from an earlier Blog Post that more or less sums up my “position” in this confusing mashup of ideologies they call online piracy:
“Unless we can enlighten those who feel that illegal downloading is a victimless crime, we will end up in a YouTube world dominated by user generated videos and sampled music.
Whatever you may think about art and money, there is no question that money is the energy that makes things happen and gets movies made. In just four years, from 2007 to 2010, film production in the U.S. dropped a staggering 30 percent. Aside from the impact on the types of movies that are getting made, consider the tens of thousands of jobs that have been lost. Carpenters, drivers, electricians, caterers and the hundreds of behind the scene jobs needed to make a single movie.
Nothing less than the future of great filmmaking and music hangs in the balance. Without the support of the fans, our rich heritage of music and film will diminish and many creative individuals will find it far more difficult or impossible to fully commit to the work that enriches all of our lives.
Making things even harder for artists to earn a living is the constant push back by many who work in the tech industry and view “content” as digital road kill. They grudgingly acknowledge that content is the fuel that powers their success, but don’t understand why they can’t bend the rules to dramatically lower the fees that the copyright laws were created to protect.
Google and the other search engine providers need to be more proactive in blocking access to illegal sites and help stem the torrent of advertising revenue that flows there as well. It is truly disturbing how many fortune five-hundred companies have advertising on pirate sites. Not only does this advertising provide them with the revenue to operate, it also acts as an endorsement for legitimacy, creating further confusion for the user.”
Will Buckley, Surviving Thanksgiving with Lester Burnham, Huffington Post, November 21, 2011
Correction; the post date is November 21, 2012 not 2011. Time flies when your having fun.
Film production slowing doesn’t necessarily indicate that piracy is to blame for the loss of a carpenter’s job. You’re citing contraction during a recession, when movies are just the type of spending that’s going to get cut first when budgets get tight. That’s just not a compelling argument whatsoever. If you’re looking for some updated numbers, I suggest BMO’s Perspectives on the Filmed Entertainment Industry 2012. Here’s what you’ll find in the summary…
Certainly, the maze may have become three-dimensional over the past few years relative to content creators, content distributors, and content users, but there should be no doubt that there is more demand globally for filmed entertainment and more dollars for content owners.
According to the report, consumer-driven revenues (which ought to be hardest hit by piracy) have grown at a 5.8% compounded annual rate since 2000. And while movie attendence has been unsteady during the recession, it jumped up by 70 million last year, & looks to jump even more this year, to 2005 levels or better despite huge jumps in home theater spending & the availability of On Demand streaming & digital services like Netflix & Hulu. And even with unsteady attendence, revenue has continue to grow & box office records continue to be broken (most recently by the Avengers movie). (Attendence/theater revenues from the-numbers.com. They actually predict a bigger leap in 2013 attendance than I do, they’re at 2002 levels, I think that’s inflated.)
Painting the film industry to look like the music industry is a misrepresentation of reality. Yeah, you’re really tugging on the heartstrings when you start talking about poor little ol’ carpteners & electritians & caterers, but you’re failing to connect production slowage to piracy.
And do you know the film industry outlook is so much different than the music industry outlook? It’s because they have embraced technology. They have gotten behind Hulu and Netflix. And Redbox. And OnDemand. HBO Go. (Anecdotally, I use all of these services regularly.) Renting movies through video game consoles. They’ve met consumers where they are, & offered better products that designed with the modern consumer in mind, & they’re taking that revenue to the bank & making up for losses to piracy. And as these services improve, piracy continues to make less & less & less sense, & these premium services start to pick up more, & more, & more steam. The tech industry is an ALLY to the film industry. Not the enemy. Don’t you see where that gets them?
You don’t hear Peter Jackson complaining that he can’t rustle up $300m dollars for his incredibly self-indulgent Hobbit adaptation. And that’s in large part because it’s learned from the mistakes that the music industry has made. (But also internet access had matured to the point that the film industry could capitalize on the transition to digital & it was ready for it, whereas for the music industry the transition happened at a very inconvenient time & took everyone by surprise.)
The methods that you’re advocating, specifically the blocking or delisting of legitimate content as a function of addressing illegitimate content (i.e. declaring sites like 4shared.com to be pirate sites, & not utilities abused by pirates), & giving the content owners say over what can & can not be posted to the internet, are incredibly dangerous, & would make it even harder for bands not supported by powerful owners of large swaths of copyrighted material in order to gain exposure. What you’re advocating would stamp out the few bright spots on the Billboard charts, namely groups like the Arcade Fire & Mumford & Sons (caveat: while I’m excited about what Mumford & Sons’ success means, this is by no means a creative endorsement of their music). And, what’s more, it could eventually put what Paul does, which is attempt to keep copyright owners somewhat in check, in danger.
All of this is to say, once again, that support for premium streaming is a step forward, & will eradicate piracy along with the ownership mentality, & anything else is either making a fuss standing still, or taking steps backwards, & in the worse case scenario it sets the stage for a return to the AOL Keyword model of the internet.
jw is the incessant Spotify Supporter we alluded to earlier. Jw what’s your take on the equity deal Spotify has with those nasty record labels?
Can’t say I’m surprised to see you conveniently side-stepping the facts again, but at least the conversation is moving into more productive territory.
I don’t care for the equity deals, but what choice was there? Sometimes you have to take a bullet going forward. It’s certainly an example of the labels putting their own interests above the artists they represent, & profitting off of their work without compensating them. It could be construed as an act of piracy in & of itself, & they should be taken to task in the same way that ought to be for their royalty fraud (among other things). But in the end, the pie stands to enlarge for everyone in spite of the major labels’ pieces. It’s not as if the labels exercise any control over the service. And I’m sure the final deal is worlds from what the major labels demanded at the beginning of the negotiations.
Unquestionably, the deal structures have to change for Spotify to really thrive going forward. And that will happen when the leverage swings in their favor as consumers begin to move away from the ownership model. The good thing is that you have profitable companies like Deezer with leverage who haven’t entered the US market yet, & if they decide to do so at the right point in time, it could change the way that these deals are structured across the board. And while I feel like there will always be room for Wal-Mart/Target/etc within the streaming sector, if one of Spotify’s competitors ends up becoming the leader of the pack, & if that makes the most sense for artists & consumers because they didn’t have to absorb the costs of being first to market, I’m completely behind that, even in spite of the fact that Spotify’s software & network blow the rest out of the water.
jw, would you like to continue this conversation tomorrow? I have an internet radio show, Thursday’s 4:00 PM EST. Our conversation would last approximately 30 minutes and I would like to talk about online advertising and what / if we should have regulations for advertising no fly zone on pirate sites and file sharing sites with excessive take down notices and streaming music on sites like Spotify and Pandora.
If interested you can contact me at [email protected]. By midnight tonight EST.
I would value that, Will
That’s why he was trying to get it for free.
It’s an ad network, man. It’s not like they specifically advertised there. I’m sure they will make sure that they don’t publish ads there anymore after this, but you’re writing this like they intentionally did so. “I know what an ad network is!”-Paul last week. “I conveniently forgot”-Paul this week.
and the “shut up Tunecore employee” shit begins in 3…2…1
“I’m sure they will make sure that they don’t publish ads there anymore after this”
…and that is, I assume, the purpose of the article, eh…
Without Lowery, this would have been ignored, and artists would have continued to support the Piracy Industry.
So, thank you Lowery!
As much digging around with ads as Lowery does, it baffles me how little he knows about advertising. This is obviously a network and not a direct ad. Tunecore has no direct relationship with 4share. To imply as much is either the result of dishonesty or ignorance.. or both.. we are talking about Lowery and Resnikoff here.
@Visitor
The issue is actually more complex than that; I fear you may simply be parroting the first line of defense from any brand or ad network here. The focus of the recent USC Annenberg study is to actually dismantle the very rudimentary argument you are setting forth, and help to expose which specific sites are being served by various ad networks, and break down the opaque mystery of it all.
In this case, TuneCore may say, ‘we had no idea’. Then again, maybe they should have looked closer (assuming they don’t want to advertise here, another matter entirely). After all, they are paying for this ad, on this site, and giving revenue to 4shared. Can it be so decentralized that no one has any idea how the machine actually operates? Don’t be foolish.
If major brands feel comfortable advertising on these sites, than they should continue to do so. That’s their choice. But that’s not what’s happening: instead, they are taking steps to remove themselves from these networks, because of the types of adjacency problems you’re looking at. And the reason they are doing that is because this highly-opaque network structure is being deconstructed.
/paul
@paul
In this case, Tunecore may say, ‘we can’t take on those costs at the moment.’ Then again, maybe they should have hired a a department to monitor and block ads from being delivered to an ever growing pool of sites that fit the vague description of “prirate site” and then pass those costs on to the artists through higher subscription rates.
Don’t be foolish…
/visitor
“”pirate site””
If you want to be taken serious, you should lose the quotation marks.
Again, this is not torrentfreak.com, and it never will be no matter how hard you try…
Oh.. Is that all I have to do?
Here..
@paul
In this case, Tunecore may say, ‘we can’t take on those costs at the moment.’ Then again, maybe they should have hired a a department to monitor and block ads from being delivered to an ever growing pool of sites that fit the vague description of prirate site and then pass those costs on to the artists through higher subscription rates.
Don’t be foolish…
/visitor
Better?
Yes.
“they are paying for this ad, on this site, and giving revenue to 4shared.”
Indeed.
Thank you for bringing this story, Paul!
Are Online Ad Networks the Birth of SkyNet?
many want to think they are…
“As much digging around with ads as Lowery does, it baffles me how little he knows about”
He’s really becoming a threat to the Piracy Industry, eh? 🙂
“As much digging around with ads as Lowery does, it baffles me how little he knows about advertising. This is obviously a network and not a direct ad. Tunecore has no direct relationship with 4share. To imply as much is either the result of dishonesty or ignorance.. or both.. we are talking about Lowery and Resnikoff here.”
Whoever wrote this is either a hired hand or just someone with a bad attitude about life.
Sorry Pal, there is something markedly unAmerican and Snarky about US Companies supporting pirate sites. Take your cynicism and disregard for working class artists elsewhere.
If you believe that advertising on criminal sites is OK, then we have a real problem.
Let’s go ahead and push this into absurdity.. Why stop at the site level? Tunecore passes their ads off to ad networks that may or may not serve to “pirate sites.” Artists themselves pass their content off to Tunecore to have it served and purchased by unknowns.. some could be murderers, rapists, criminals, sinners of all varieties (“pirates” as well since the sentencing is the same if not worse today). Should the artist keep track of every individual that purchases their content through Tunecore? Should the artist take on these costs? It’s just a matter of “deconstruction,” right?
Following this logic further, artists, too, should be held accountable for these misdeeds and be ready and willing to take on the costs.
If you believe it’s OK for criminals to purchase your content, then we have a real problem.
“If you believe it’s OK for criminals to purchase your content, then we have a real problem”
Please lose the pirate speak, this is not torrentfreak.com.
Arghhhh mateeyyyyy.. Should I be a dismissive hack instead?
You already are. arrrghhh yourself.
Arrghh.. actually I’ve been quite responsive… arrrghhh.. but nice come back potsy..
As I stated earlier.. Artists have been profiting from criminals long before Tunecore was ever conceptualized.. You may not like where Lowery’s logic ends..
Simply, it’s the artists’ stuff. If they profit from it, I don’t see the problem. If pirates and ad networks profit from it without giving anything back to the artists, I see a problem.
I am sure any random 7 year old child could understand this.
What is this “stuff” that is in the ownership of the artist? Burning a plastic disc doesn’t make it anymore than just a piece of plastic (and certainly not someone else’s piece of plastic), unless you, like the 7 year old, believe in magic.
The pirates are out to get you, don’t let them brand you with their mark!!
I don’t usually get drawn into these arguments, but it seems like there are a couple of complex issues at stake here.
David Lowery is pointing this out because it’s ironic. Ironic because the advert is pitched at artists, and they’re the ones creating the content that is being illegally shared on 4shared. If someone did actually click on the TuneCore ad, they’d be both submitting to the fact that they were intending to download someone’s hard-produced work illegally, and expecting that the average punter would pay for theirs.
The argument about transparency also seems to have been obfuscated here. TuneCore should care where its adverts go, because these are the sites that are eating away at its revenues. We have to lobby companies such as TuneCore so that they do care about this. Recently in Vietnam a few high profile companies pulled their advertising from Zing, an mp3 sharing site offering music for free not giving any returns to artists. They will certainly sit up and take note when their own revenue disappears.
Lobby (email) TuneCore and say you’re not happy about seeing the adverts on a site offering illegal downloads. They’ll do the rest, if they get enough emails.
Funny how MySpace drops to 10m visitors a month & they’re practically on their deathbed, but 4shared’s 630,000 monthly visitors are destroying the industry.
Porn sites have no legitimate advertisers, but they seem to be doing ok. If the “legitimate” advertisers all pull out, there will always be advertisers to fill the gap. It behooves the piracy sites to keep the illicit advertising to a minimum, but it’s hardly make-or-break. So, in a way, if you kill off all the legitimate advertisers, you’re indirectly exposing your children to porn.
What might be a better exercise than taking screen shots of banner ads is to create a chart of how many popular piracy sites there are, & what their traffic looks like over time. From there we could at least make some guesses as to how much of that traffic is music-related, & get a picture of what piracy really looks like & what direction it’s headed, & what strategies might actually be effective.
Personally, I feel like this whole “shame the advertisers” thing is a shot in the dark at best, completely futile at worst. It really makes Lowery seem like he doesn’t know how the internet works.
Flood these piracy sites with Spotify ads, that seems much more effective to me.
“Personally, I feel like this whole “shame the advertisers” thing is a shot in the dark at best, completely futile at worst. It really makes Lowery seem like he doesn’t know how the internet works.”
No, it makes you look like you don’t know how companies think.
What is the purpose of advertising?
To get bad publicity?
To look like morons?
Because that’s what they accomplish when they appear on Lowery’s List.
That list should be mailed to the press every month.
Weak.
If you believe that unlimited free file sharing is your destiny, fine. But most people who understand the problem and realize it is wiping out peoples ability to make a living aren’t quite so, capitalistic? Your comments reminds me of the conservative right who feels no obligation to fair play, just profits.
Where do you draw the line with this. How about indentured slavery sites; that ok?
You sure you’re talking to me? 🙂
No, my bad…I got carried away and misread your post my friend. Sorry, and thanks for being on the court with us.
My pleasure.
I know it’s confusing with all these guests named ‘Visitor’, btw. We really should register…
Trust me, the number of people who think these companies are “morons” is a lot smaller than you think, Lowery is just a squeeky wheel. Most people don’t even perceive these ads, let alone remember them, nevermind care where they’re coming from or why they’re showing up. If I considered the moral implications of every ad I saw on the internet, I would lose my mind. People just don’t care.
But the squeeky wheel gets the oil, & I’m sure a lot of companies will see this little dust up as an opportunity to be seen taking a moral high ground.
But let’s call this what it is… it’s not like they’re running commercials during a television show. It’s not like they bought sponsorship advertising. It’s not like they have a print ad that’s being shipped to newstands in every town in the country. It’s network-served BANNER advertisements that appear & disappear all over the internet. It’s rather innocuous, & if any company responds to this out of fear, rather than just an opportunity for some good PR, they’re putting way too much stock in the whole thing.
The reason that this isn’t as dangerous as it’s being made out to be is because everyone going to the site isn’t necessarily going to see that particular ad, the way that they would when everyone tunes into a television program or opens a magazine. So it’s not verifiable, & there’s no shared experience. What this really boils down to is that David Lowery was offended by some ads because he’s going out looking to be offended by ads, & now everyone is supposed to be sympathetic to that. That’s not a real story. And the affect that it has on a brand is marginal at best.
It should be made clear that this is not a story about traditional advertising, & brands should not be expected to respond in the way that they would have before the internet. Network served banner advertisements are a beast unto themselves, far less consequential.
But even in spite all of that, say suppose all “legitimate” advertisers were driven from advertising on piracy sites. That still leaves porn ads, cialis ads, diet pill ads, anything sold in infomercials, graphic t-shirt companies, humor sites, etc. Sure, maybe demand goes down which drops their rates & so they lose some money, but the idea that this campaign is going to eradicate piracy websites is naive if not downright absurd. There will always be companies willing to advertise on piracy sites.
“What this really boils down to is that David Lowery was offended by some ads because he’s going out looking to be offended by ads”
No, what it boils down to is that piracy costs billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands jobs, and people don’t accept that kind of waste anymore.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/20130118blocking#GijhPaHvrxt_Unm3CinA0g
Lowery’s initiative is just the beginning.
Is this what “the cause” has devolved to? Your juvenile trolling & Lowery’s campaign against banner ads? And silly threats of strikes?
Thank god for streaming, offering a real solution to the technological disruption of the aughts, or else we’d all be in real trouble.
Actually jw, all this is a bit more complicated and serious than you care to admit.
A. And I’m sure this will a yawn moment for you, but most people don’t equate piracy with crime. This whole advertising half baked “dust up” will not only make it more difficult for pirate sites to keep their servers operating, but it will also point up that basically you have merchants giving away merchandise that doesn’t belong to them.
B. I have a friend that works at legal aid, who has defended people caught for illegally downloading music. They often claim that they saw ads by legitimate companies that led them to believe that the site was ok.
So whatever. I don’t think American Express or even dukin’ donughts is gonna wanna be there if we turn the knob, jw.
“Tunecore pays pirate site 4Shared to give the artists music away for free”
Ouch!
So I’m supporting a pirate site because I pay TuneCore. 🙁
Alternative headline: David Lowery found pirating John Mellencamp
Actually, if you read the Mellencamp piece and were familiar with David Lowery’s stance on the issues, you would find that Mellencamp actually based much of his piece on what Lowery had previously shared.
If you’re going to try and make a point, at least base it in some kind of reality.
It’s a fair question. How do you tell if someone is pirating and someone is just “making a point”?
Ridiculous.
This is just a google ad-sense’s ad, which content appears automatically/randomly based on keywords.
There is no relation at all btw TuneCore and the websites that display their ads through Google ad-sense!
lostindigitalmusic.com
You don’t get it.
The point is to force companies away from advertising agencies that support organized crime sites or to force those agencies to change their behaviour.
And it works:
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/20130107levi
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/20130110
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/20130103google
Alright.
How do you prevent “pirate” sites to use Google’s ad-sense (or any other similar ad solutions)?
“How do you prevent “pirate” sites”
Like I said elsewhere in this thread:
Please lose the quotation marks around pirate if you want to be taken serious. This is not torrentfreak.com…
quotations.. grumble grumble.. torrentfreak.. grumble grumble.. assumes everyone who uses quotations is the same person.. grumble grumble.. forgets to make an actual argument.. grumble grumble..
“forgets to make an actual argument”
What do you expect?
You don’t argue with guys who doubt the very existence or piracy sites…
True.. You wouldn’t want to get caught pitching a straw man at me like Paul did..
You think I doubt the very existence of piracy sites? Looks like you’re a pitcher as well..
Ian Rogers comment in 3,2,1…
Not a surprise. Google Adwords plugs your ad in on thousands of sites- simply matching your keywords with those appearing in the content of the site.
Thanks, this was my point!
You don’t have one.
Again, the purpose is to force brands away from advertising agencies that support organized crime — or to force these agencies to change their behaviour.
The worst of these agencies is obviously Google.
Without Google, the Piracy Industry would collapse.
“Without Google, the Piracy Industry would collapse.”
Exactly – we all need to keep hammering Google to stop aiding and abetting piracy
“Without Google, the Piracy Industry would collapse.”
Sort a ‘Malkevich-Malkevich’ argument, don’t you think?
It’s funny, it’s awkward, it’s good morning reading. Thank you for doing it. Lowery realizes it may be beyond TuneCore’s control (UNTIL someone snapps a screenshot and it gets covered in digitalmusicnews. then they do something about it). Now to move this idea forward, let’s figure out how an ad creator can easily limit where their ads appear. A simple blacklist should exist. Does it?
Clearly there are many existing solutions to identifying at least the most egregeous sites without the risk of “falsely accusing” and depriving a few sites of their “freedoms”.
I don’t support or condone injustice for anyone, but there is a level of absurdity that tens of thousands of artists are getting ripped off and some people are concerned that a few sites will get shut down by mistake.
You use freedom in quotes like it is meaningless to you.
That. Or he doesn’t understand the term.
Quite the contrary really. Freedom is very important and the obfuscation of it by unlimited free-file sharing proponents like yourselves is a big part of the problem. The real issue is freedom of choice. The artists’ right to choose what happens to his work, not someone else.
Like I said.. He doesn’t understand the term..
A bit of homework for you Fareplay..
Thought experiment: If using one’s own resources (ink, paper, plastic, computer, etc.) to replicate and share ideas that may devalue someone else’s product is synonymous with piracy then using one’s own resources (ink, paper, plastic, computer, etc.) to replicate and share ideas that defame and devalue someone else’s product (say, the product of Tunecore, for example) should also be considered piracy.
By your definition of piracy and freedom, freedoms need to be taken away from Resnikoff and Lowery..
We don’t wish to obfuscate the subject.. Quite the opposite.. It’s all a matter of deconstruction..
Then I encourage to create your own work and set about deconstructing it however you see fit.
Unfortunately, I think the point was lost.. By “deconstruction,” I meant breaking down how things are and how things work. In both examples, the individuals are using their own resources (unowned by anyone else) to bring about the same result, devaluation of another’s product. If this is any basis for the concept of piracy, then Resnikoff and Lowery are both guilty of it.
We can resume this discussion another time..
-Tod
It’s okay when someone defrauds someone else if they do it within my arbitrary set of morals.
Do you mean there is something wrong with around and calling people’s businesses dealings illegal without it being proven in a court, while actively trying to harm their business and interfere with it? Say it isn’t so.
Paul – It’s most likely cookie based marketing. The person probably went to Tunecore’s site, got a browser cookie, and then the ad showed up on another site. The same thing with remarketing could have happened on any site that allowed Google ads (baking site, adult site, etc). While we blocked that site last week, Tunecore hadn’t, and it’s surely an honest oversight on TC’s part.
Brian
So, all this advertising we’re seeing on pirate sites is a glitch?
This site has not been convicted in court of piracy. It is merely your opinion until then (if ever). I don’t disagree or agree with you because no judicial system has weighed in on this site. I just don’t understand how someone can throw around finite legal terminology without judicial support. It very well may be illegal but your use of the term prior to a court decision convicting of the crime is highly suspect and leads me to ignore you. I find this unfortunate because I may miss out on very good points you may make in the future. I will try to keep a more open mind.
Oh really, so a website isn’t a pirate site just because I say it is?
Be prepared to be called a “torrentfreak” or “anti-copyright cultist” for stating the obvious.
You sir, are a torrentfreak and anti-copyright cultist.
I have first hand knowledge of many of independent artists looking for distribution that use 4shared on a daily basis for various purposes. As I know it was an oversight (possibly) on Tunecore’s part for not flagging this with the ad network, It isn’t a bad place to target independent musicians looking for distribution.
If it’s an ideological decision, completely your call. However, I believe a demand-influenced analysis of the audience would yield the answer that 4shared and similar sites would be a valuable customer-acquisition ad platform.
A site that hosts some illegal files is a goldmine for artists who seek to learn about much music from the past not available through traditional means. They may even pick up illegal files along the way. They may share their own music’s stems with a remixer. My point is to remind that these are consumers of distribution platforms that any company in the space should be happy to message with value proposition.
Again, if you don’t want ads there, don’t put them there – your call. My opinion is a purely business/customer acquisition one.
I have no idea what people mean by “dismantling a mafia.” It doesn’t sound worth a comment from the inflammatory language.
Hope all is well!
Aaron
“I have no idea”
Nope.
If you can tell me one party convicted of a crime related to IP in this screenshot, then we can talk about crimes and if they are organized enough to meet the technical definition of a mafia. Until then, you are just saying meaningless words. Not to be offensive but you aren’t giving anything close to the minimum evidence for this to meet the level of mafia; much less proof that a crime is taking place. In the meantime, you will be treated as someone using inflammatory language for ideological purposes, instead of someone making actual arguments and at least giving evidence that the situation meets the qualifications of the technical terms you are using.
“The person probably went to Tunecore’s site, got a browser cookie, and then the ad showed up on another site. The same thing with remarketing could have happened on any site that allowed Google ad”
Yes, I sent the link toTuneCore, and that was indeed their explanation.
As usual, the culprit is Google.
Aaron,
Thanks for inadvertently bringing up so many good points, particularly your comments about 4shared being labeled an illegal site and your point that while it may be an illegal site, the courts have not “offically” deemed it so.
And really this has been a big part of the problem all along, the fly in the ointment, the wack-a-mole scenario that is so often referred to in this tragic game and media manipulation that is online piracy.
Simply put, the judical system moves at a glacial pace, while foreign profiteers are setting up shop.
So this really brings us back to advertising revenue and how to dramatically restrict the flow of revenue to illegal sites without enduring long protracted legal battles.
This can and will be done. Stay tuned.
Second, Aaron. What you leave out is sites like 4shared would be ghost towns without the good stuff, by people who don’t want to give their work away. Any exposure that unknown bands get is at the expense of others.
So as reasonable as you want to sound, you’re really pretty obvious.
You seriously need to be more careful of randomly accusing people you don’t like of committing crimes they haven’t been proven in a court of law to be committing. That could come back and bite you really hard in the end.
>> Second, Aaron. What you leave out is sites like 4shared would be ghost towns
>> without the good stuff, by people who don’t want to give their work away. Any
>> exposure that unknown bands get is at the expense of others.
Here’s the thing. File sharing sites are a utility. They profit from piracy, unquestionably, but do they cause it? Can they really even be said to enable it? When piracy occurs, equally at “fault” here are the makers of the hard drive that the files originate from, the ISP of the uploader, the facility that hosts the file sharing site’s servers, the company that supplies electricity to that facility, etc. Irrespective of the legality or illegality of a particular file, it’s these files (and the storage & copying of these files) that keep the lights on for all of these companies. How much has Western Digital or Seagate profitted from piracy? I’d be willing to bet it’s quite a lot, perhaps more than these file sharing sites. Hard drives ain’t cheap.
And I’ll admit, proponants of file sharing don’t help, & neither does the attitude of guys like Kim Dotcom. And while I understand that file storage sites are where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, in terms of this type of piracy, but that hardly makes them any more “pirates” or what they do any less illegal than the other companies in the chain of service.
By issuing this unilateral condemnation of these sites, you’re suggesting that people ought not be able to upload a file to share with a specific internet user or, indeed, the whole internet, whether it’s a home video of a child’s birthday party, a large graphic or audio file from a freelance designer or music engineer, some kind of password protected manufacturing data that’s going to ultimately create jobs in a growing industry sector like clean energy, the source code for a huge open source internet project that’s going to facilitate communication on the internet, or, indeed, Miley Cyrus’ latest album.
At the end of the day, these file sharing sites are no more at fault for piracy than the makers of aftermarket auto parts or even the California Department of Transportation are responsible for street racing. It’s the individual that is at fault here, who is committing the crime, & abusing the service (unless, of course, as it’s been suggested from time to time, that these websites are specifically encouraging users to upload copyrighted material). And the RIAA has tried pursuing individuals & this has proven to be a worthless endeavour that does far more bad than good.
This war against file sharing websites, & the fantasy that piracy can be eradicated if we could just figure out the right knob to turn, is entirely misguided, & shows an ignorance of the law (see: MegaUpload), a fear of technology, & a stubbornness, vindictiveness, & victim mentality that are like quicksand, keeping the industry from moving past this disruption.
How many services have been shut down? And what has it helped? I’d love to see that graph. How much all of these “victories” cost & just what effect they had on piracy.
I think the ISP level warnings are at least focused on the correct copyright abuser, the one actually committing the infraction, but it seems to me that, if we could just get consumers to ditch the ownership mentality & get on board with premium streaming, this would all take care of itself. There are no profits to be made by shutting down 4shared.com, but there are profits in premium streaming (that is, past the point where it’s subsidizing free streaming).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that copyrighted material should be accessible without license from file storage websites. I’m just suggesting that the war against these sites is misguided, & there are much, much, much better ways to solve the problem.
What I meant to say was…
…but that hardly makes them any more “pirates” or what they do any less legal than the other companies in the chain of service.
Well jw, very interesting. Your post demands a proper response and I’m guessing from some of your references you are on the West Coast and are at a time advantage. I’ll circle back later today.
My only advantage is that I’m more concerned with profits & sales than I am with regulation or revenge, which allows me to entertain the idea that better technology, rather than anti-technology, will inevitably be the solution to disruptive technology.
I’ve not seen a single mention of inconvenient facts like exactly what percentage of these websites’ profits are tied to copyrighted material, or any proof that they’ve encouraged the sharing of copyrighted material. (Not suggesting that there is none, just saying I haven’t seen it.) And what of sites like Yousendit & Fileserve? Who have crippled or disabled the sharing functionality of their sites all together & seem to get along just fine. What this suggests is that you are demanding that legitimate users of legitimate services be denied the ability to share legitimate files with the internet through the storage services under the premise that the storage service itself is committing an act of piracy, which it is not.
Furthermore, there’s another FUNDAMENTAL problem with your campaign against these sites. Most, if not all of them, offer a premium service that allows users to upload larger files, use the service more often, or download files more quickly. I don’t know what percentage of their revenue subscription accounts for, but one thing is clear: shaming advertisers isn’t going to make it go away. Between that & the reliability of Cialis ads, I don’t really see this smear campaign taking these sites offline.
Any way I’ve tried to look at it, your campaign comes across as half-baked. I understand that it seems like the knob to twist in order to stop the flow of piracy, but I’m suggesting it’s much more complicated than that.
And California just seemed like the place where street racing occurs. Any real anthropologist would put more stock in my use of “folks” & “ain’t.”
“At the end of the day, these file sharing sites are no more at fault for piracy than [insert favorite car analogy]”
Um, you forgot to mention MAFIAA & the Fascist States of America and their role in this draconian conspiracy against our Internet.
Are you in the wrong place? The NRA stuff is on another site.
We’re music guys here.
No, I just pointed out that jw’s pirate speak would be close to perfect if he squeezed a few more torrentfreak terms into his speeches.
And MAFIAA is TorrentfreakSpeak for the Axis of Evil (RIAA and MPAA). 🙂
Aka the Movie And Film Industry Association of America. The boogeyman of pirates since at least 1999.
It’s kinda scary that Buckley didn’t pick up on the MAFIAA reference. It’s feels like he joined the Internet in 2010 and just became shocked and confused about piracy without knowing anything about its history. How are you suppose to fight against “da freehadists” when you aren’t even aware of the most trivial of their rheotric?
** Music And Film Industry Association of America.
Good post. I think it’s also fair to say that piracy has driven innovation in computer networking and storage technology, and also a lot of research in P2P and shared-nothing distributed systems (a lot of the important algorithms started popping up post-Napster) which directly influenced the whole “cloud” idea.
To elaborate on the P2P thing, I like of the advantages of P2P design are applicable to large robust distributed systems.
It doesn’t matter if that failure is the server crashing or the server’s location being raided by the police. A node failure is a node failure. The desire to make a P2P system that is immune from legal actions led to a lot of the recent research on failure tolerant protocols, and why a flurry of research in robust P2P protocols occured shortly after Napster’s shutdown.
So advancements in P2P technology designed to make it difficult to shut down a service also benefit systems that are designed to continue operating with multiple cascading failures. You’ll see that a lot of same fundamental algorithms that drive BitTorrent innovations also drive stuff like next-generation database designs.
Also, it goes without saying that the bandwidth and storage intensive nature of filesharing drove a healthy industry in this area as well, so jw is very right as saying that piracy enabled lots and lots of unrelated industry.
Legal alternatives can also help drive this industry, however, and probably will in the future as piracy is starting to decline at least in the developed world.
Agreed.
Also, the demand for storage, and specifically portable storage, has helped to bring about all sorts of advancements, to where we can carry a terabyte of data on our keychain now. Solid state storage has been the best personal computing advancement I’ve experienced in years (performance-wise), & portable solid state storage has enabled smart phones to do pretty incredible things. And the catalysts for all of these things were Napster & the iPod.
What people don’t tend to be aware of is Spotify’s use of p2p in it’s desktop client. Their servers are only responsible for something like 10% of streaming data, 55% comes from local caching & 35% is shared between users via p2p, which accounts for the response & reliability of the network. As connection speeds increase (specifically as Google Fiber reaches the coasts, & we catch up with the many, many countries we lag behind, in terms of internet access), these kinds of distributed systems are going to be crucial to avoiding infrastructural bottlenecks.
What’s clear, & we have years & years of data to prove this, is that copyright owners are not qualified to police the evolution of technology. And that concern for copyright is not paramount going forward, economically or otherwise. Because what may cause headaches for copyright owners may eventually drive things like mobile banking, which is more important than Carly Rae Jepson or Tom Cruise.
So the key is not to control technological evolution in order to protect an antiquated system, it’s to LEVERAGE technology in order to create a new, BETTER, future-proof system, with economic concerns built in. Thus, premium streaming!
“What’s clear, & we have years & years of data to prove this, is that copyright owners are not qualified to police the evolution of technology. And that concern for copyright is not paramount going forward, economically or otherwise. Because what may cause headaches for copyright owners may eventually drive things like mobile banking….”
Well, I’m actually speechless. In the past I have observed that music, film, literature, art and photography are considered by the tech community as little more than digital road kill and you jw have provided the proof.
Your’s is a world of muted color and numbing silence. You have nothing to offer and confuse intelligence with wisdom.
Goodbye, jw
Wow. Way to “gracefully” bow out. I’m not going to beg you to respond, because I know that your argument is an emotional one, & that you haven’t totally thought it through. But consider the following.
Payola. Nonpayment of royalties. Rootkits. Shady accounting practices (when are we going to start calling this royalty fraud?). $1.29 256kbps m4p files. Six figure fines for sharing a handful of mp3s. Continued exorbitant executive salaries in spite of loss after loss after loss…
I wouldn’t put these guys in charge of my lunch money, nevermind the internet. You’d have to be crazy.
Should companies like Napster, who explicitely broke the law, be punished? Absolutely. Should users who upload copyrighted material be punished? Sure, if we can find a way to do it that makes sense (i.e. something that’s not six figure fines, or spending millions & millions on lawsuits in order to extract thousands of dollars, or fundamentally altering the internet with SOPA or PIPA). But should technology companies that are abused by users be condemned as pirates, subjected to smear campaigns, & wiped off the internet? I really don’t think so.
This may shock you, but copyright isn’t the most important thing. It’s just not. The music & movie industries don’t drive our economy. Banks are more important. Technology is more important. Hell, Google is more important. It always baffles me is that people play the economy card… the music industry has lost x many billion dollars, & y many jobs. But then they bring Google into it… when Google trades at $700+ a share. If your reasoning is economic, give me Google over Warner Music Group any day of the week. Because of Google, I can get in my car & think of anywhere in the entire country I’d like to be & I can drive straight there. Google is how I decide what restaurants to eat at. Google is how I learned how to fry catfish & to play Elliott Smith songs. If it comes down to Google versus pretty much anything, I’m choosing Google.
And I’m not saying Google should be allowed to break the law. They’re complying with the DMCA, & they should. If you don’t like that process, ratify the DMCA. I’m all for that. But I’m willing to bet 4shared complies with DMCA takedowns, too (if they don’t, I’m not defending them).
And I’m not saying, “Tough shit, music industry.” I’m just saying that the old way isn’t worth fighting to save, nevermind undermining the evolution of technology in order to save it. Sure, fight piracy, but only in an effort to convert people to premium streaming! Don’t shutter releases, run ads on file storage sites on Tuesdays that say “‘Pirate’ the new Adele Record on Spotify!” “Put the Pirate Bay in your pocket. Subscribe to Napster.” Convert people. Make a concerted effort to bring the industry in alignment with the modern consumer. Embrace technology, & milk everyone for that $9.99 per month. That’s the ONLY way forward. All of this arguing & Google hating & smearing file storage websites… it’s standing still, at best.
Respond or don’t, I don’t really care. I’ve thought through my side of the argument, & I know exactly what your side is. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve saved yourself some time because I “have nothing to offer and confuse intelligence with wisdom.” Because we both know “your’s is a world of muted colors and numbing silence” doesn’t actually mean anything, & that you’re just copping out because that’s easier than defending your side of the argument.
That would be “Put the Pirate Bay in your pocket. Subscribe to Spotify.” Not Napster. Typo.
Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum.
I will say, however, that “digital road kill” is the PERFECT way to put it. The music industry has been standing in the middle of the information superhighway with it’s hand out, trying to stop oncoming traffic for going on a decade & a half. If it gets squashed, it’s not without owning a good portion of responsibility.
There is a lane for you, oh stuborn music industry. Just for you. It’s called premium streaming. You can join us, if you’d like, in our travels towards the future, & leave all of this drama behind. It would actually be good for everyone.
We’re so far apart, there’s really no point in continuing. But there is one thing I do need to clarify. FarePlay does not represent the music industry or the film industry.
We represent individuals who make music and film and are concerned about their financial survival. We believe mastery of any artform is a full time job and personally I’m more interested in supporting an artist than an IT guy or Google for that matter. And I guess all artists should feel honored that technology has indeed prospered at their expense.
Lastly, I think the choice of banks as viable, honorable businesses is somewhat up for debate, but then again that would depend on your “opinion” of the bail out and mortgage practices.
This is your problem right here, Mr Play. You see it as an either/or situation. I don’t. That’s where we differ.
There was a point in time when music was precious. It wasn’t perfect, but people believed in Bob Dylan enough to call him a traiter when he started playing rock & roll. People believed in the Rolling Stones enough to riot against the police at each of their shows. Real musicians like Cream could sell out Madison Square Garden. When Napster launched, music was no longer precious. It was controlled by corporate entities, & Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, & Ashlee Simpson were getting record deals. Scott Stapp was falling off the stage at Creed concerts & that Hoobastank guy was singing completely out of key at the VMAs.
The internet is still precious. If we allow it to be controlled by corporate interests, the exact same thing is going to happen. It will become like TV, where you turn it on & you have the choice of Disney or 15 channels that Disney owns or the 100 channels that Viacom owns or the Home Shopping Network or a bunch of crap. I understand that you’re arguing on behalf of the independant artist, but they’re not going to be the ones calling the shots. Their best interest is the interest of the people, which is that the internet ought to be as free & open as it possibly can be.
Where music is concerneed, there’s a symbiosis here, where piracy can be made obsolete, independent musicians can control the distribution of their work, where artists can, once again, profit from their work, where consumers get a fair deal, where no one has to purchase their entire music collection in a new format or at a new bitrate ever again, & none of it happens at the expense of technology or the internet or open communication.
I’m not saying that artists should get screwed or that music should be free, or that copyrighted material should flow freely on the internet. I’m just saying we have to get our priorities straight, & where we can, make the best decisions possible that benefit all parties involved, & it blows my mind that you don’t see that in premium streaming.
jw, so interesting that you keep coming back to “premium streaming” which really hasn’t been part of this discussion. You sound like a shill for Spotify.
There is still great music being made. It is the times that have changed, wouldn’t you agree jw.
And the name is FarePlay.
That’s the whole point… I’m trying to make premium streaming a part of the discussion. I’m not offended by being called a Spotify shill, but that makes it sound like I’m trying to drum up profits for Spotify. I’m much more concerned that artists & consumers get a fair deal. I’m advocating for the Spotify platform on behalf of myself more than I am advocating for Spotify the company.
I understand that this, to you, is a moral crusade, & that it’s about personal validation as much as it’s about anything, and about believing that you’re on the correct side & fighting the good fight, futile as it may be. But there is no dishonor in simply allowing file sharing to disipate. And what’s going to accelerate that process is premium streaming & the move away from the ownership mentality.
It’s telling that you think that premium streaming “really hasn’t been a part of this discussion.” It shows exactly how boxed in you are to an antiquated model of consumption, that you see it as completely disconnected from the burgeoning next paradigm (I would actually call it the current paradigm). The former paradigm (ownership/digital downloads) is so chock full of shortcomings & inherent flaws (file sharing, limited libraries, obsoletion, extravagant hard disk occupation, non-portability, organizational problems, misrepresentation, extraction from context, etc.) that I don’t really know why you, or anyone else, for that matter, has any afinity for it at all.
Times certainly have changed. We live in a time where corporate interests control culture, & corporate interests have decided that “reality” is the new music. Someone in a suit made that decision somewhere along the line, & corporate sponsored music was replaced with corporate sponsered reality & TMZ is the new NWA & Daniel Tosh is the John Lennon for the millenial generation, & Perez Hilton is the Freddy Mercury. Yes, there is still great music being made, & lots of it. But that doesn’t mean it has any influence. That doesn’t mean that any of those artists get any air time on television or radio, & if we’re not careful, they won’t be allowed on the internet, either.
What we’re facing, is a return of the AOL Keywords model, where information & ideas can’t be freely posted, it has to be approved. And who is going to be approved? Artists who are celebrities, who fit into the TMZ model. Could Paul write freely in a post SOPA/PIPA internet? Could DMN even exist in a post SOPA/PIPA internet? Not for very long, I would suggest. Not posting about powerful copyright owners’ royalty fraud.
These are things we have to consider because we’re setting precedents right now. We have to prioritize our interests, & where we find symbiotic relationships between technology & openness & copyright, we should pursue those avenues ardently, with the same degree of fervor guys like you & Lowery are pursuing copyright violators. And that’s why premium streaming can’t be left out of this conversation.
“You have nothing to offer”
… and that is, in fact, the heart of the matter, isn’t it?
Pirates literally don’t have anything to offer.
Just so you know, your dismissive attitude doesn’t adequately cloak your misrepresentations of facts or mischaracterizations of commentors. I can see what you’re trying to do, but I don’t think you’re netting out in the black with your juvenile trolling.
Sorry, but it’s the truth.
“jw is very right as saying that piracy enabled lots and lots of unrelated industry”
I’m sure most of us understand that you feel a need to be a part of society. And it’s perfectly natural that you do your best to justify crime.
But the truth is that criminals don’t have anything to offer.
Here are the facts about piracy:
According to Unesco, 10 billion Euros and 185,000 jobs were lost 2008 because of piracy in the EU.
Source:
According to Institute for Policy Innovation, $58 billion and 373,000 jobs were lost in 2007 because of piracy in the US.
Source:
Siwek, Stephen E.,The True Cost of Piracy to the U.S. Economy, report for the Institute for Policy Innovation, Oct. 2007.
Seriously? $58b & 373,000 jobs lost?
The IPI is a joke.
[T]he Motion Picture Association’s claims of $58 billion in actual US economic losses and 373,000 lost jobs came from this press release (which can also be found on Scribd). These numbers originated at a think tank called the “Institute for Policy Innovation” – an organization that Businessweek once profiled in an article called “Op-Eds for Sale.”In it, an IPI analyst freely admitted to taking payoffs from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing “op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist’s clients.” The IPI’s president supported this behavior, saying it was neither wrong nor unethical, and dismissing those who apply “a naïve purity standard” to the business of writing op-eds.
Source: http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/20/the-numbers-behind-the-copyright-math/
I wish Reid would more seriously disect those figures, but I don’t think anyone reasonable gives them enough credit to bother investing the time or effort. The source is dubious enough as it is.
I think the main point is that just because something is downloaded doesn’t mean that it would’ve otherwise have been purchased. And so estimating growth based on piracy activity is… well it’s not the way to go about it. It’s stupid, is what it is. It shows contept for reality. The truth is, as Reid says, cable revenue is way up from pre-piracy levels, & so are sales of dvds/blu-rays. In truth, most content industries are still growing at predictable rates (the music industry being the obvious exception). While music artists may not be selling 2.4m in a week like N’Sync did in 2000, films are still setting box office records, & 3d films are bringing on even MORE revenue. Music is certainly the outlier here, largely because of the changes in format (among other things).
Have you thought this through? The music industry loses… let’s give them the whole shrinkage, $8b per year, ignoring all other factors (a la carte downloads, media fragmentation, etc). And the last figures the MPAA released were $6b… let’s bump that up to 10 to be safe. So we have $18b/year. Where does that other $40 BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR come from? Certainly not console video games. And Adobe doesn’t seem to be hurting, even though their software is probably pirated more than anyone else’s.
On top of that, I have a hard time believing the film & music industries combined were ever more than 400,000 strong. Yes, there’s a ton of programmers out there, but programmers are still one of the most in demand jobs in the country, even in a down economy. They fix their own piracy problems by implementing serial number registrations & the like. They’re not whining about, lobbying congress.
I mean, this report was written in order for people like you to take it & say “Here are the facts,” in spite of how ABSURD they are. And I dunno if you believe them, maybe you do. But let’s just all agree to not bring up these bogus facts again on DMN.
“$58b & 373,000 jobs lost?”
Yes, that was the price of piracy in 2007 — in the US only.
Unfortunately, reality is much worse today.
According to Unesco, the comparable loss to piracy in the EU — 10 billion Euros and 185 000 jobs in 2008 — will grow to a total loss of 240 billion Euros and 1,2 million jobs in 2015 because of piracy.
Source:
Whether you’ll continue to justify crime is of course up to you.
But do keep the current economic climate in mind. Losing jobs may not seem like a real problem to you, but I can assure you it is to a lot of people.
You are unbelievably dense.
Why is it that sites like Dropbox and YouSendit have so few DMCA takedown notices? They have standards and practices that fight piracy. They don’t want to be pirate sites.
So it’s not that cloud storage sites are inherently pirate sites.
Now do you have any “fact-based” arguments?
Yousendit & Dropbox don’t have searchable storage, that’s why there aren’t DMCA takedown notices. Conceivably, I could have 1,000 people sync a folder on my dropbox. And we could all add our music collections to that folder. And dropbox would sync them all, & we’d all have a shared music collection & no one would know the difference. It would be hard drive swapping on steriods.
But that’s my point… you’re demanding that sharing, whether files are legitimate or not, must be kept private. It can not be done publicly, because eventually someone’s going to upload Creed’s greatest hits & then, DMCA removal or not, recess is cancelled for everyone.
That’s not how it should work. That’s the exact thing that the DMCA was designed to avoid.
Therein lies the problem. When there was only a few people capable of publishing to a wide auidence, piracy wasn’t a big problem because you only had to police these few people.
Now ANYONE can publish to a wide auidence. That’s what the Internet enables. Unless you take this power away, you’ll never reduce piracy to pre-Internet levels. The Internet and their desired piracy enforcement are fundamentally at odds.
If you are acting like Dropbox does anything special to fight piracy, you’d be wrong.
“From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, weʼd be out of business. If it was not protected, thereʼd be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But thereʼs a simpler reason: Itʼs wrong to steal. It hurts other people, And it hurts your own character.” Steve Jobs
* Interview with Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson page 396, Chapter thirty-one; “The iTunes Store”
No one is arguing that it’s right to pirate. What’s being argued is whether or not it’s ok to launch a smear campaign against an internet service because it’s been abused by users.
What point are you trying to make?
It’s your method that’s wrong, not your motivation.
It’s a bit of childish attitude they have. You’ll see it repeated in different form, but it is always something along the lines of “if you don’t agree with our brand of piracy enforcement, you are with the pirates.”
I bet if you ask Lowery or Buckley if they support the government putting cameras in everyone houses to counter offline piracy (which of course, is huge), they’d be like “hell no”. Does this make them piracy supporters too?
“No one is arguing that it’s right to pirate.”
My god, you’re boring.
Thanks for giving me credit. But that wasn’t my post. It was one of my colleagues.
But, to the anonymous troll: don’t kid yourself.
I totally understand how these ad networks work. It’s really not difficult to understand. And this shit is automated now. 100’s of thousands of screenshots and packet logs. I assume this will come in handy when the RICO trial begins.
RICO Trial? Eventually one of these sites is gonna go down. It doesn’t even have to be copyright infringement. It’s highly likely bad people are doing other illegal stuff. Like tax evasion, money laudering or child porn. Anyone with red flag knowledge that continues to work with these sites is putting themselves, their investors and their clients in a f*cking world of hurt. Might not be today might not be this year. But it’s gonna happen.
How do we know it’s possible to keep ads off of these sites? Coca Cola and Apple do it.
How do we know if they are pirate sites? You just look at Google’s Transparency report which details the number of infringing links.
right here:
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/?r=all-time
This isn’t hard at all. If an ad network can take the time to set up a payment/customer account, they can look to see if the site is a multiple infringer. The ad networks just don’t want to do it cause they are greedy. But that doesn’t matter.
We’ll just keep sending these screenshots to the brands that are advertising on these sites. We’ll let the brands work it out with the ad networks.
And this must be working why else would a story like this suddenly appear:
http://business.time.com/2013/01/18/policing-the-web-how-googles-cops-track-down-bad-ads/
I thought this initiative might be of interest…
I’m sorry Lowery, you don’t get to decide what is illegal or not. That’s the justice system’s job.
@Lowery
If not ignorance, then dishonesty. If you know how things work, then you know Tunecore has no direct relationship with 4shared and that you were targeted for a Tunecore ad by agnostic code, cookies, etc. because you had visited there in the past. So you’re automated process must have visited Tunecore, then crawled supposed pirate sites.
Tunecore is trying to profit while at the same time helping artists and helping artists profit. They have to weigh costs and risks. Fishing sites is not their main focus.
You haven’t responded to my suggestion that your defamation of Tunecore’s product is synonymous with piracy. Still waiting for an answer…
Answer me. How is your defamation (the spreading of certain ideas) and devaluation of a product any different than the devaluation of a product as a result of replication (the spreading of certain ideas).
“Answer me.”
Or else… 🙂
You’re right. I shouldn’t kid myself. Why should I expect an answer even if it is apart of a fact based argument.
“Good post. I think it’s also fair to say that piracy has driven innovation in computer networking and storage technology, and also a lot of research in P2P and shared-nothing distributed systems (a lot of the important algorithms started popping up post-Napster) which directly influenced the whole “cloud” idea.”
Why does it feel like I’m having a nightmare in a bad Tarantino Movie?
It’s always scary to see people defend crime. You never know where it stops…
I agree, like defending defamination against legitimate businesses.
It’s the truth. I’m sorry you live in a world where everything is composed of pure evil and pure good. You live in a black and white world where piracy is literally Hitler, and thus are unable to see any good effects that piracy has directly caused.
Speaking of Hitler, his funding of missiles to bomb civilians in London also directly led to putting a man on the Moon. The first head of NASA was literally a former Nazi. Maybe we should have executed Wernher von Braun instead? His work directly killed many thousands of people.
How about no. If we lived in idealistic la-la land, we’d be a satellite state of the Soviet Union.
“Speaking of Hitler”
Do you really have to break Godwin’s law, too?
A more careful reading of Godwin’s law would imply that it is fulfilled, not broken.
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of someone’s misusing Godwin’s law approaches 1.”
“We’re so far apart, there’s really no point in continuing. But there is one thing I do need to clarify. FarePlay does not represent the music industry or the film industry.”
—
Then why is your rherotic exactly like MPAA/RIAA’s (especially 10-15 years ago)? I think you have a lot of uncollected royalites you acquire you acting like their mouthpiece.
More boring pirate speak, bla bla bla…
im pretty sure that google does not allow their ads on webpages that distribute pirated material, and Tunecore bought this ad through google. so its google that is to blame for this.
on second thoughts this website 4share.com is not a pirate site, its just a competitor to yousendit.com and dropbox. and they take down any pirate material if they are asked to do so.