The online advertising company Etology has announced it will cease to serve ads to BitTorrent sites on December 1 claiming the sites pose a risk to their advertisers. In a letter to their customers, Etology wrote, “Due to the legal implications involved with sponsoring torrent sites, our management team has made the decision to remove from our network torrent sites that promote copyrighted content.”
At issue is advertiser association with sites that host/deliver/enable the sharing of copyrighted material and the potential lawsuits that might arise from such associations. The whole file sharing/borrowing/streaming/downloading thing is certainly a slippery slope and one that will likely see moves like this occur from time to time.
