PopAds accuses MPA of publishing false and misleading accusations of piracy *TorrentFreak

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Advertising company Popads hit back at the MPA after the Hollywood-backed group named the company a “notorious marketplace” for facilitating piracy. Many of the claims are false or misleading, PopAds counters, while summarizing a long list of anti-piracy reporting options that seem largely ignored.

Each year, major copyright industry groups compile their lists of the most popular piracy sites, which are publicly reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR).

These overviews provide input for the annual overview of notorious markets released by the US Trade Representative’s office, with sites like The Pirate Bay, Fmovies, and Uploaded featured as frequent offenders.

compression tool

The goal of this process is to identify pressing piracy problems and encourage foreign administrations, from where these portals often operate, to take action. It is largely a diplomatic leverage tool with the ultimate goal of helping American rights holders confront online piracy.

Over the past years, there has been a lot of debate about which sites and services should be included. Not everyone agrees that YouTube downloaders and domain registrars are havens for piracy, and adding advertising companies is seen as a controversial move as well.

The copyright holders clearly believe these services are worth calling out. This is evidenced by the submission of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which lists a wide range of third-party services. It includes an advertising company PopAdswhich are described as follows:

PopAds and PopCash are ad networks owned by Tomksoft in Poland but integrated in Costa Rica. PopAds generates advertising revenue for copyright infringing sites including gomovies123.org, megafilmeshdplus.org, video.az, and mega1080.com, while PopCash is currently being used by watchmoviestream.me. PopAds previously generated advertising revenue for Openload and Streamango, two of the most popular video hosting services with over 136 million and 32 million visits per month, respectively, according to Similar (Openload and Streamango shut down in October 2019).

PopAds responds

PopAds is not satisfied with this callout. The company’s attorney, Kamil Nagrabski, sent a rebuttal to the USTR and noted that the MPA’s filing contained false and misleading information. For example, PopAds has nothing to do with PopCash.

“My manager has no affiliation with PopCash and never had anything to do with it. My manager has no idea why he is associated with PopCash at all. This information is completely false and misleading to the general public and to your organization,” the rebuttal begins.

The main complaint from copyright holders is that PopAds caters to alleged piracy websites. The suggestion is that the Costa Rican company is doing nothing to stop or reduce piracy. PopAds does not entirely agree with this assertion.

The ad company indicates its DMCA reporting tool. While the DMCA does not mention ad networks, PopAds has chosen to implement this functionality to help reduce piracy. Not only does PopAds remove ads from reported piracy sites, it also terminates the accounts of repeat offenders.

“Of course, repeat offenders, anyone who tries to cheat the system gets banned immediately and permanently. My Principal also runs a multi-account control system that automatically detects and blocks new accounts opened by someone who had a banned account in the past,” notes PopAds.

Hacking ban lists

The advertising outfit doesn’t stop there either. Recently launched a new Adscore Compliance Intelligence system. This automatically detects copyright infringing websites, which are subsequently blocked from displaying ads.

Currently, PopAds uses several official piracy blacklists. This includes Operation Creative’s IWL blacklist from the City of London Police, as well as the WIPO ALERT blacklist, which is maintained by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Sites on these blacklists are blocked in real time.

These prevention efforts prevent ads from appearing on blacklisted sites. In addition to this, PopAds also makes sure that the content uploaded by these sites is blocked by frames as well.

“MPA can easily block ads”

The above indicates that rights holders have a variety of options for reporting and blocking content on piracy sites. This also applies to MPA, which works with IWL blacklist.

An MPA can only blacklist any website they believe is illegally hosting copyrighted content to Operation Creative IWL. Once this happens, the PopAds system will automatically stop showing any ads on the reported website within 24 hours without notice. No human intervention,” PopAds notes.

Based on the PopAds rebuttal, it appears that the copyright holders still have room for improvement on their end. For example, the MPA told USTR that PopAds generated revenue for gomovies123.org, megafilmeshdplus.org, video.az, and mega1080.com. However, it did little to report this activity directly to PopAds.

PopAds’ attorney informed the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR): “My manager has never received any DMCA complaints on any of these sites, nor have they been blacklisted on any of the piracy sites that my manager participates in.”

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A copy of PopAds’ full rebuttal, submitted as part of USTR’s 2021 Review of Notorious Markets, is available here (pdf)