Another Agency to Police the Internet?

You've probably already heard by now that the largest ad agency - Group M - is going to stop putting its ads on sites with pirated content.
That's right, these Mad Men are going to try to stop the free flow of information that's the whole raisin d'etre of the world wide web!

You're probably wondering how they plan to do this, right? I am too. After all, the single smartest company in the world - Google (also the largest force for letting everyone know everything that there is) can't tell who has the rights to what content without the legitimate owners actually telling them, so how are these chumps going to do it?

As far as anyone can tell so far, they're just making a list of sites that they think are the bad guys and they're putting them on a 'don't buy' list so they won't buy ads from those sites on the list even if they make sense for their clients' needs for reaching the audiences that visit these sites to see the content they have there that nobody really knows if it's illegal anyway.

Of course apart from making themselves the police of copyright on the internet, they're also making themselves the financial executioners of the internet by denying some potentially legitimate sites the money they are trying to earn by giving their visitors what they want in terms of content and so forth. By taking away funding from these sites, they're going to destroy the free flow of information that has been the goal and glory of the internet since Tim Berners-Lee first made it happen for all of us (sorry Al Gore - it wasn't you, baby!).

Naturally we still have to wonder how they're planning to monitor all these sites to see what's what and what's where and so forth.
We have to wonder who will decide who is a pirate.
We have to wonder who will be told about these guilty-before-even-being-charged allegations.

I don't know about you, but I think it might be wise to let this bunch of madmen know that we're not going to take this all lying down, and that we want to find our content where we find it and that trying to stop the free flow of information on the internet is not only a bad idea as well as kind of un-American, but it's also basically impossible and they'll find out that there are forces out there that will pwn them in a minute if they don't let us have our content.

Posted by Gyro Gearloose