14 DAY TRIAL // Google is going to increase its efforts to fight against online piracy by putting a stop to ad revenues going to sites that host illegal content.
According to TorrentFreak, the announcement is going to come sometime later this week, when it will be confirmed that Google has joined a new coalition that seeks to cut off pirate sites from its ad revenue, following similar initiatives in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The so-called Memorandum of Understanding between the online advertising industry and the music and movie industries in Italy will reportedly signal the creation of a central body to tackle this issue.
In the past months, and even before, there have been discussions on the topic of whether or not cutting off revenue is the most powerful weapon in the fight against online piracy and many agree that this seems to be most effective.
The logic behind the move is that operators would rather cut their loses short if they don’t make money from these sites and they’d leave them to die, with no support whatsoever, or they’d just shut them down completely.
The publication writes that the new initiative will be launched sometime this week and that Google will be on board, which will ultimately attract a lot of attention from the media and the world’s citizens.
The entire announcement is scheduled to be made on June 12, during the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s IAB Events 2014, where the music industry anti-piracy group FPM and the representative for the movie industry will take a stand against online piracy.
The fact that Google is joining their battle is quite beneficial, says Enzo Mazza, chief of the Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana. “Google is already doing a lot of efforts in this area and the company promoted a strategy so-called ‘follow the money’ which we consider part of a general strategy based on enforcement on one side, self-regulation and legal offer on the other side,” he said.
The project will see a joint committee put together to oversee the technical implementation of the project, which will apparently include auditing advertising companies and networks for compliance with the new rules.
Whether these measures will really affect online piracy in any way, it remains to be seen, but even so, this won’t solve the core problem, which is the fact that consumers in many countries simply don’t have access to a wide range of legal alternatives that are actually accessible from a financial point of view.