Forget suing filesharers: in 2014, anti-piracy efforts follow the money

Posted on April 9, 2014

Taking individual filesharers to court is now a discredited anti-piracy strategy for even the most hawkish music, film and software industry rightsholders. Their preferred approach in 2014 is to follow the money instead.

That means focusing their efforts on piracy sites, through three main tactics: pressuring search engines to remove links to infringing files and demote piracy sites in their rankings; forcing ISPs to block their customers from accessing those sites; and trying to squeeze their flow of advertising revenues.

The latest example of the latter came this week, with an announcement by the City of London Police that it is launching an Infringing Website List (IWL for short) to gather the URLs of piracy sites and persuade brands, media agencies and ad networks to ensure they’re not advertising on them.

The IWL is the result of a three-month pilot in 2013 backed by a host of creative industry bodies – the BPI and IFPI from the music industry, FACT from films and TV, The Publishers Association from books – as well as advertising industry bodies the IAB, ISBA and IPA.

Here’s how the IWL is designed to work: the creative industry bodies provide the initial list of infringing sites, which is then “evidenced and verified” by the City of London Police’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), providing a list of undesirables for advertisers to avoid.

PIPCU claims that the pilot resulted in 12% less advertising from “major household brands” on the identified sites. “If an advert from an established brand appears on an infringing website not only does it lend the site a look of legitimacy, but inadvertently the brand and advertiser are funding online crime,” said the unit’s boss Detective Chief Inspector Andy Fyfe.

PIPCU was set up in September 2013, and is currently being funded by the UK’s Intellectual Property Office. Its new list thus has firm government backing.

“Disrupting the money unlawful websites make from advertising could make a real difference to the fight against copyright infringement,” said creative industries minister Ed Vaizey this week. “It is an excellent example of what can be achieved through industry, Government and law enforcement working together.”

Not everyone agrees that it’s such an excellent thing, however. The Pirate Party UK has criticised the initiative, pointing out that the IWL will not be made public, and that even if website owners find they are on it, it is unclear how they can apply to be removed.

“If the process is anything like the current censorship of pirate sites it will involve uncontested court rulings where the supposedly offending site isn’t present to defend their legitimacy,” said spokesperson Andrew Norton, who went on to describe the measure as “yet another example of the government loaning itself out to favoured groups to act as free private leg-breakers”.

Update: PIPCU has confirmed to The Guardian that at the first instance of a website being added to the list, its owner will be contacted by officers from the unit, and given a chance to provide feedback and if necessary change their ways. That initial contact will also warn sites that if they fail to comply, they may face actions including domain suspension, disruption of ad revenues and “advert replacement”.

It might seem obvious that the Pirate Party would disagree with an initiative designed to crack down on piracy, but questions about how a list of infringing websites is compiled and “evidenced” are important.

Past cautionary examples include the shutdown of several hip-hop blogs at the behest of lawyers acting for the same labels whose promotional teams had distributed tracks to those blogs in the first place. Meanwhile, a blacklist compiled by advertising company GroupM in 2011 included non-profit digital library Archive.org and several cloud storage services.

More transparency about which sites are on PIPCU’s list and how its appeals process will work would be a good idea, because dealing quickly and fairly with mistaken inclusions will provide a stronger defence for the list’s main intentions: to funnel advertising dollars away from piracy sites and towards legal digital services.