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Business News Deals Digital
Google and GoDaddy sign up to new US ad-industry-led anti-piracy initiative
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 20 June 2016
Google and GoDaddy have both signed up to a new initiative being led by the US advertising industry to try to stop piracy websites from benefiting from ad income.
The so called ‘follow the money’ approach to targeting online piracy – so trying to cut off the income of piracy set-ups – has been popular for a while in a number of countries, and especially in the UK where the City Of London Police’s IP Crime Unit has been very vocal about this tactic over the years. The relatively new Trustworthy Accountability Group is now promoting these efforts in the US.
The organisation says its priorities are: “eliminating fraudulent digital advertising traffic, combating malware, fighting ad-supported internet piracy to promote brand integrity, and promoting brand safety through greater transparency”.
And now tech firms Google and GoDaddy have both signed TAG’s ‘anti-piracy pledge’, which means that they are committing to “take commercially reasonable steps to minimise the inadvertent placement of digital advertising on websites or other media properties that have an undesired risk of being associated with the unauthorised dissemination of materials protected by the copyright laws”. Simple.
Though, TAG confirms to Torrentfreak, so far Google’s commitment is as an advertiser itself, rather than as the operator of an ad-network that distributes other people’s advertising to third party sites. Commitments from the Google ad-network are arguably more significant, though TAG says that it is working to achieve that too.
