Biggest?
"GroupM is the world's biggest advertising agency, with $3.5bn in annual online billings"
Really? Isn't Google closer to the $30bn/year mark?
Advertising giant GroupM will stop buying advertising space on more than 2,000 global sites said to offer pirated or unlicensed content. The blacklist, assembled with help from key entertainment clients, includes The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, but also features legitimate download sites such as BitTorrent Inc and business …
They won't be doing that...
That affects their product (users), not their customers.
Just install adblock. You never get plagued again.
Not to mention the pages load so much faster, since they don't have to wait for the gerbil powered ad servers to wheeze out their crap-tastic, crudd filled flash ads
Very interesting idea, but all files on the internet are NOT illegal to download! Like I said interesting idea but don't pull your vigilante justice on those doing nothing wrong.
It is good to know that if I couldn't make a LEGAL BACKUP because of some asinine copyright DRM protection BS, I don't have to purchase the media AGAIN! As I now have a list of over 2000 URLs to download the media and make my LEGAL BACKUP... Har Har Har
Hmm paranoia says that this was WAY to easy... Everyone knows that blacklists can work two ways... Why are they giving us a free list of websites to download software from? Wonder how many sites on that list are honeypots.
As if by accident. Next stop, ban public libraries. Fahrenheit 451 is here and it's not the goverment trying to suppress dissent, it's the MPAA and RIAA trying to impose a tax on all forms and expressions of human culture.
Piracy is the only ethical response.
The point of advertising is to reach as many people as possible, therefore companies want to have their wares advertised on sites with the highest traffic. So what this company is saying to their customers, "we are no longer going to place your ads on high traffic sites, in fact we are going to deliberately avoid high traffic sites and put your ads on low traffic sites." Surely this is self defeating? When the companies who pay these idiots find that their ads are no longer attracting anywhere near the previous revenue won't they simply move to a another advertisig agency that will list their ads on high traffic sites?
I wonder what the reaction of the sites that are perfectly legitimate will be, if I ran a business something like yousendit.com and was blacklisted and basically accused of piracy I wonder of someone may choose to see that as liable/slander as they are basically accusing the valid actions of unlawful acts.
"We are serious about combating piracy and protecting our clients' intellectual property as forcefully as we possibly can," GroupM Interaction Global CEO Rob Norman said
Um, were I one of his clients, I'd be asking Mr. Norman just exactly what the hell he thought he had been doing advertising on these sites up until now.
However, no doubt this question will no be raised, what with the advertising industry being full of unethical, amoral tossers.
GJC