Digital Advertising on Suspected Infringing Websites

The European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights at OHIM has published a study on the problem of digital advertising on websitessuspectedof infringing intellectual property rights, originally titled “Digital Advertising on Suspected Infringing Websites”.

Nowadays, such illegal websites pose a great problem, offering to consumers digital media content without authorisation of right holders. The research has shown that approximately 86% of such websites offer protected content (music, films, games, software, e-books etc.) to consumers  for free, and the profit is gained via online advertising. In doing so, advertisers often have not sufficient knowledge or awareness of the fact that they use websites for advertising products or services that offer various digital content without authorisation, thus illegally.

For the purpose of this study, there was a monitoring conducted over 280 websites during six weeks, suspected to be infringing intellectual property rights, from all 28 EU Member States, in the course of which there were over 180,000 ads collected from 1,400 webpages.
In this study 54% of ads collected were high risk ads, such as malware or some kind of fraud, adult and the like. These ads surely pose a risk to consumers.

Furthermore, the study indicates a significant role of intermediaries i.e. advertising companies placing ads on websites. Intermediaries usually take steps to prevent placing an ad on an inappropriate website when demanded so by the right holders; however, such action is often questioned because of speed of making decisions in the world of digital advertising.

The study includes a number of other useful data as well in relation to the problem of digital advertising on suspected websites as well as general information from this sector.

The study is available at the following link.

Datum novosti: 08/02/2016