Many of Australia's top brands are funding music piracy by advertising on illegal download sites.


These brands currently include national supermarkets, retailers, banks, insurers, airlines, mobile phone providers, legal firms, fast food outlets and online bookmakers. But whether they are aware of their ads appearing alongside illegal content - in some cases, including downloads of full discographies of leading Australian artists such as Gotye and Nick Cave - is still unclear. Either way, swift action is needed if the brands wish to escape becoming local victims of a new approach to fighting music piracy that is beginning to gain traction overseas.


Although the last decade has seen content groups, ISPs and government at loggerheads over various methods aimed at curbing piracy, including forced ISP site blocking and new graduated response laws, this new approach targets the lifeblood of many pirate sites: advertising revenue. And in many cases it is artists that are leading the charge by publicly "naming and shaming" the brands, advertising providers and payment processors associated with advertising on pirate sites. And much is at stake, with a recent UK court hearing estimating one leading pirate site's advertising revenue at almost US$25M per annum.
Digital Pass $1 for first 28 Days


This new approach is beginning to deliver results overseas. Earlier this year in the US, Levi's announced it would be pulling all of its advertisements from pirate sites after being singled out as a culprit. Other brands including Amazon, American Express, BMW, Dropbox, Netflix, Samsung, Target and Walt Disney World are also under the spotlight for appearing on illegal sites.


Artist groups in the UK have also highlighted many major UK brands advertising on pirate sites, including British Telecom (BT), Tesco, Sky Bet, the National Lottery and even Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Governments are also beginning to take notice of this emerging approach, with Spain's government last month announcing proposed new laws that would ban advertising on pirate sites and deliver fines of up to EUR300,000 to infringing advertisers and payment processors.


Additionally, many industry groups are placing pressure on payment providers, including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, to cut payment processing for such sites. They are also forcing these companies to become proactive in ensuring their logos are not appearing on illegal sites, thereby removing the sense of legitimacy they can provide to uncertain users. This pressure is already making an impact, with pirate site Newzbin2 citing payment processing difficulties as its reason for closure late last year.


Google is also under heavy pressure from industry groups, with both its search engine and advertising networks in the public spotlight. The push from both industry groups and artists for Google to do significantly more in fighting piracy will only increase as the company moves towards the launch of its own Google Play and YouTube music streaming services later this year.


Although Google agreed last year to begin incorporating the number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices it received from rightsholders in its search algorithm - thereby pushing offending sites further down its search rankings - the approach has so far been seen as ineffective.


This was highlighted earlier this year by Record Industry Association of America research that found legal sites such as Amazon and iTunes reached the top ten search results a little more than half the time, compared to infringing sites appearing on the first page of search results 98% of the time. It also found that the autocomplete function of Google's search engine suggested sites with multiple infringement notices for 88% of searches.

Source: The Australian


Aside from search, Google's online advertising also came under significant public scrutiny in January when the University of Southern California's Annenberg Lab listed the company at number two on its inaugural list of top advertising providers to pirate sites. The list was developed using one year of data from Google's own online Transparency Report, which publicly tracks and displays the number of takedown requests the company receives from copyright owners regarding infringing domains in search results. The negative publicity appeared to deliver results: by the time the second Annenberg report was released just one month later Google had vanished from the list of top ten pirate site advertisers.


Although no Australian brands have yet come under public scrutiny for advertising on pirate sites, the growing success of overseas "naming and shaming" campaigns certainly means it will not be the case for much longer. And even though advertising on pirate sites appears to be largely an overseas problem to solve, Australian brands and online advertising providers have a responsibility to ensure their advertisements are not funding the operation of illegal sites. Unless the top Australian brands currently advertising on pirate sites take immediate action to ensure they are not funding the operation of these sites either directly or through advertising partners they will need to face the music very soon. And in a very damaging and very public way.