A new report by USC’s Annenberg Innovation (AI) that attempts to link advertising networks like Google and Yahoo to piracy, has continued the trend of pushing an outdated and misleading agenda on the public, by suggesting that the entertainment industry is on the brink of extinction thanks to piracy alone. AI’s report takes issue with Adsense and other networks’ adverts that appear on file sharing sites, hoping that with its report it can name and shame companies that advertise through these schemes to halt their business with them and thereby cut off financial support for the file sharing websites. Google has suggested that the report is mistaken and that ultimately, just because Google code appears on a site, it doesn’t mean that Google supports piracy.
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