Skip to footer

Google and others agree to White House anti-piracy guidelines

AOL, Google, and Yahoo are among the companies that have signed on to a set of best practices guidelines intended to combat piracy. 

|
Reuters
A woman walks past the Google offices near the city centre in Dublin, July 8, 2013.
  • By Matthew Shaer

A group of companies that includes AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google has signed on a set of anti-piracy guidelines established in cooperation with the White House.

Under the guidelines, the companies agree to respond promptly to complaints from copyright holders and remove any advertising content that has been proven to either violate a copyright or involve pirated/counterfeit goods. 

"This is an important step toward maintaining a healthy Internet and promoting innovation and protecting intellectual property," reads an excerpt from the guidelines. "These efforts should be undertaken in a manner that is consistent with all applicable laws and the balance of copyright interests, including fair use, and that respects privacy, free speech, and fair process." 

So how extensive is the piracy problem? Pretty extensive, it turns out. Consider the fact that in 2012 alone, Google shut down more than 82,000 accounts for "attempting to advertise counterfeit goods." In addition, the search giant says that it "disabled ad serving to 46,000 sites for violating our policies on copyright infringing content." 

But some doubt that the new guidelines will work. Over at PC World, Ian Paul points out that although Google and Yahoo have signed the agreement, plenty of other companies haven't. 

"The most prominent example would be the notorious BitTorrent-tracking site, The Pirate Bay," Mr. Paul writes. "An advertising-supported site, the Pirate Bay currently gets a large part of its advertising from exoclicks.com – an ad network based in Spain, not associated with the ones participating in the new best practices agreement. So the effectiveness of this new takedown regime may be limited." 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Google and others agree to White House anti-piracy guidelines
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0716/Google-and-others-agree-to-White-House-anti-piracy-guidelines
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe