Google and Other Companies Take New Approach To Piracy

Google cuts advertising to popular torrent sites.

Music piracy is a pretty big deal these days. Since the emergence of Napster, the first large peer-to-peer (P2P) music sharing website, the overall profits of the music industry have decreased by nearly 50%. Although the use of popular torrent sites to download music have slowed in growth over the last several years, it is still estimated that between 4-10 trillion songs are downloaded illegally each year. Clearly, these huge numbers are having an enormous detrimental effect on musicians and industry workers.

Many different organizations, from the RIAA to big name labels, have taken staunch perspectives on this issue, but the fact is that there is no way to incentivize customers to not want to get the same quality of item for free, rather than paying $10 or a monthly subscription fee. However, major search engine sites such as Google, Yahoo, and AOL believe they may have come up with an alternative solution. Rather than eliminating the want of the customers to visit pirating sites or destroying the sites themselves, these technological giants believe they can simply cut the funding of these sites. Most torrent sites use some form of advertising to make the majority of their profits; Google, Yahoo, and the other companies involved in this initiative hope that by simply limiting their available advertising the sites will lose money and disappear.

So far, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Condé Nast, and 24/7 Media are all onboard with this plan, which has White House approval. Unfortunately, no matter how many hotshot technology companies sign onboard, the entire plan hinges on users and private internet service providers to report to report cases of piracy to the companies before they can take action. Whether this will actually happen on a wide enough scale to make an impact remains to be seen.