After decades of wasted effort and billions in wasted money, it’s good to see that somebody is finally starting to figure this out.
There will always be online piracy. That’s just a fact. No amount of enforcement or revenue choking or anything else you can think of will ever stamp it out completely. At best maybe you can drive it further underground, but at this point even that’s a stretch. If you kill one, three more pop up to replace it. It’s been that way for years. And even if somehow you get a decent handle on one aspect of it, somebody is going to unleash some sort of new technology and we’re right back where we started. So instead of continually crying poor as you set your money on fire and toss it down the futility hole, why not come up with a system that might actually accomplish something worthwhile for everyone?
A few weeks ago, we reported that anti-piracy company DMCAForce offered a rather unique partnership to torrent and streaming sites.
Where many companies in the advertising industry do their best to avoid sites that are linked to piracy, the San Diego-based company takes the opposite approach.
In an email, the company promised the sites a revenue-sharing opportunity. Instead of removing a link or file, they can remain up, if the site owner agrees to share part of its advertising space.
“DMCAForce recently launched a new way for File Sharing sites to work with content creators. Where you as the file sharing site can distribute their content for free, but in exchange provide the advertising space around the product,” the email read.“We chose this approach as corporations, large to small, constantly pay DMCAForce and our other companies like DigiRegs, for services to remove content all day every day,” Bauman said.
“It’s a loss on the content creators books to pay us, but a necessary job that needs to be done. To further that, it’s a loss on the books of the place it’s taken from, as it is technically ad space for users who are looking for their product.”
When copyright holders have to pay to remove content and site owners lose appealing content and advertising space, nobody wins.
The key to this being successful is the very thing we don’t learn here. What are the revenue splits? And unfortunately, that also might be the key to the whole thing’s undoing. This might work just fine on a small scale with lesser known companies, but once the bigger players get hold of it, what happens? The next time one of those corporations isn’t trying to take all of the money for itself will be the first, and nobody on the other side is going to stand for that if they can avoid it. And once that happens, yet again we’re right back where we started.