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Google wants to starve pirates of revenue instead of outright blocking them

Published May 29th, 2013 8:00PM EDT
Google Anti Piracy Strategy

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Google is getting sick and tired of the entertainment industry stamping its feet and demanding that it do more to block pirates from its search results. TorrentFreak reports that Google’s U.K. policy manager Theo Bertram said during a panel on online piracy this week that blocking links from search results is mostly a pointless exercise because there are simply so many other links that pop up in their place. The better solution, he said, would be for advertisers to give the company a list of websites where they did not want their ads to appear and ask Google to make sure that those sites are starved of advertising revenues.

“Blocking websites, I don’t think is as effective as going after them as a business,” Bertram explained. “It’s not Google’s job to go around the web to declare whether sites are legal or illegal, but if Coca-Cola comes to us and says here’s a list of 500 dynamic sites and we don’t want you to place ads on those, that’s a slightly different thing. It’s almost a marketing thing for the brand.”

Brad Reed
Brad Reed Staff Writer

Brad Reed has written about technology for over eight years at BGR.com and Network World. Prior to that, he wrote freelance stories for political publications such as AlterNet and the American Prospect. He has a Master's Degree in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University.