David Unleashed

“Media Firms Say Google Benefited From Film Piracy”

This was the headline that caught my attention yesterday.  My first response, no kidding.  And it is not limited to film piracy.  Adsense has created an entire industry made up of content pirates.  Google cannot have it both ways.  They cannot penalize web site rankings with duplicate content penalties while at the same time encouraging individuals to create additional inventory for Adsense.  I do not have any hard data that I can provide publicaly but we have seen this at PRWeb.  Companies, generally based overseas, taking content from our archives to re-purpose on their web sites with the goal of driving traffic and Adsense revenue.

This is a big problem.  Companies and web sites are being penalized for duplicate content when they are not guilty of anything but being victims of content piracy.   Now add insult to injury.  I have seen cases where pirated copy outranks the source web site.  Come on.  Does anyone else see this?  Any solutions that we can share with the community.  This is NOT a new problem.  I gave up trying to work with Google because I found heir process is cumbersome; usually requiring DMCA compliance.  I did have a Googler come up to me at Pubcon in Boston offering to help by identifying violations in TOS that would make it easier to shut down pirate sites.  Again, it just seems like too much burden placed on the victim site.  Keeping ahead of these pirates could become a fulltime job.

Open for comments.