White Bullet News and Updates

White Bullet’s piracy demonetising programmes drastically reduce ad revenues to piracy websites across Europe, analysis finds

peter.szyszko@white-bullet.com (Peter Szyszko) — Fri, 20 May 2022 09:54:52 GMT

Analysis of White Bullet’s demonetisation programmes reveals that 5bn ad impressions were blocked from piracy websites in 2021

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Publication by the European Commission of the study on the impact of the MoU on online advertising and intellectual property rights on the online advertising market - 2020 ad monitoring exercise

peter.szyszko@white-bullet.com (Peter Szyszko) — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 14:38:30 GMT

The publication is now available to view on the European Commission’s website

London, UK 5th August 2021: A large-scale study of the impact of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on online advertising and intellectual property rights on the online advertising market has now been published by the European Commission.

London, UK 5th August 2021: A large-scale study of the impact of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on online advertising and intellectual property rights on the online advertising market has now been published by the European Commission.

The European Commission facilitated a MoU on online advertising and intellectual property rights (IPR), which was signed in June 2018. This voluntary agreement between companies and associations from the advertising industry - including advertisers, intermediaries and interested stakeholders, such as IP right holders - seeks to minimise the placement of advertising on websites and mobile applications which infringe copyright or disseminate counterfeit goods by engaging cross-party stakeholders to collaborate and share best practice.

Following the first study published in 2020, White Bullet was commissioned by the European Commission to conduct a study for 2020 to evaluate the estimated amount and type of online advertising on IP-infringing websites; to estimate the ad revenues collected by IP-infringing website owners; and to analyse the impact and effectiveness of the MoU on the online advertising market.

The report can now be viewed in full on the dedicated webpage of the website of the Publications Office of the EU. More information is also available on the MoU webpage .

Peter Szyszko, Founder and CEO, White Bullet, comments: “We are delighted to provide data and analysis which sheds light on this fast-evolving and often underestimated threat. IP infringement in the EU has a significant impact on economies through lost jobs and tax revenue, impacting innovation and business. It also constitutes serious safety and security threats to consumers who could be targeted with fraudulent advertising, phishing attempts or the dissemination of malware.”

White Bullet’s platform looks for IP-infringing content, examines each infringement's context, and determines structural violation on a commercial scale - providing accurate piracy risk scores based on this analysis. It detects piracy across multiple digital ecosystems, remaining up-to-date in real-time, and tracking that all-important advertising and financial impact - with AI and machine learning taking the strain. It has already stopped millions of pounds of ad spend from funding piracy. By connecting rights owners and the advertising industry with real-time data about piracy risk, so all parties can take action, White Bullet’s solutions allow clients to understand the universe of piracy and to stop it from generating revenue.

For more information

Peter Szyszko

peter.szyszko@white-bullet.com

About White Bullet Solutions

Founded in 2013 by a leadership team of experienced Intellectual Property lawyers from the media and advertising industries, White Bullet offers companies piracy risk data and protection, brand safety solutions and full transparency on their advertising placement and digital supply chains.

White Bullet works collaboratively with brands, policy makers and the advertising industry to safeguard advertising spend and prevent ad placements from appearing on IP Infringing domains and apps. White Bullet is a certified anti-piracy solutions provider under the advertising industry regulator TAG and is a stakeholder to the Memorandum of Understanding on online advertising and IPR.

White Bullet comprises IP experts and dedicated technical engineers who specialise in AI, big data models and predictive machine learning. The team includes highly skilled investigators and data analysts experienced in tackling the funding and distribution of pirated content. With offices in London, New York and Los Angeles, White Bullet advises policy makers and government bodies on regulatory and compliance programmes globally.

Advertising Fuels $1.34 Billion Illegal Piracy Market, Report by Digital Citizens Alliance and White Bullet Finds

peter.szyszko@white-bullet.com (Peter Szyszko) — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 13:43:01 GMT

Amazon, Facebook, and Google are Among Recognizable Brands Funding Piracy Websites and Apps

WASHINGTON, DC, August 12, 2021 – Online criminals who offer stolen movies, TV shows, games, and live events through websites and apps are reaping $1.34 billion in annual advertising revenues – including from some of the most iconic global companies, according to new research from the Digital Citizens Alliance and White Bullet.

The report – Breaking (B)ads: How Advertiser-Supported Piracy Helps Fuel a Booming Multi-Billion Dollar Illegal Market – details a year-long investigation into how brands and advertising intermediaries help support the operators of illegal piracy websites and apps through the placement of ads. Amazon, Facebook, and Google are among the most prominent companies found to fund piracy operators, even as these criminals offer risky advertising that exposes consumers to fraud and malware.

The combination of piracy, malware, and fraud poses significant risks to Internet safety. Consumers that say they visit pirate websites and apps are two- to three-times more likely to report an issue with malware than those that don’t visit these illicit websites and apps, according to a new research survey.

“For too long, online piracy has been treated as a nuisance and not the multi-billion dollar industry that baits consumers to expose them to fraud and malware, hurts the reputation of brands and the overall advertising ecosystem, harms creators, and poses new challenges for law enforcement,” said Tom Galvin, executive director of Digital Citizens. “It is time for Fortune 100 companies and the legitimate advertising industry to stop funneling tens of millions of dollars to criminals.”

The research found that ads for Amazon, Facebook, and Google accounted for 73 percent of all major brands advertising that appeared frequently on piracy apps during the year investigation. However, there is a recent significant decline in Amazon ads showing up on piracy websites and apps. This demonstrates that the issue can be addressed when a brand makes it a priority.

“This report confirms the simple fact that digital advertising funds piracy,” said Peter Szyszko, founder and CEO of White Bullet. “Despite the alarming scale of the problem, today we are fully armed with AI technologies that can both track illegal activity and advance solutions. That underlying data is the evidence needed to drive action and change. We have already stopped millions in ad spend from funding piracy, reducing the profit of Intellectual Property crime, but clearly more has to be done. By connecting rights owners and the advertising industry with real-time data about piracy risk, all parties can take action.”

The report details a lucrative and broad illicit ad-supported piracy industry that also poses malware and fraud risks to consumers, businesses and organizations - as well as the major brands themselves:

The top websites that offer stolen content generate $1.08 billion in global annual ad revenue. For the major players, it’s big business: the investigation found that the top five of these websites made an average of $18.3 million in revenue from advertising. Many of these websites are in a constant state of churn, meaning they are changing domains and redirecting to avoid enforcement and bypass advertising blocklists.

The top apps that offer stolen content generate $259 million in global annual ad revenue. Just as with websites, piracy apps and advertising can be quite lucrative: the top five of these apps made an average of $27.6 million in ad revenue. These apps remain a smaller piece of the piracy pie than websites, but they are growing at a more rapid pace.

The brands that place the most digital ads overall, which include many of the Fortune 500 companies (“Major Brands”), are among the key revenue sources for pirate operators. Due in large part to the proliferation of advertising on piracy apps, these Major Brands paid pirate operators roughly $100 million in the last year to advertise on their platforms. One in four ads on piracy apps is from well-known companies.

The risks that piracy websites and apps pose to Internet users, businesses and organizations was reinforced by the research. White Bullet reviewed 664 billion ad impressions and found that roughly one in three piracy websites and apps have risky advertising that exposes consumers to fraud and malware.

A follow-up research survey also reveals that recognizable companies face reputational risks with piracy. Two out of five Americans reported that they think less of these companies when they see brand advertising appear on piracy websites and apps, according to a July survey of 2,126 respondents. The research also found that Internet users reported that brand advertising make pirate websites and apps seem more credible.

The survey was conducted 7/28-7/29, 2021.

The full report can be found at:

https://www.digitalcitizensalliance.org/clientuploads/directory/Reports/Breaking-Bads-Report.pdf

For more information, contact:

Josh Zecher, josh@vrge.us , 703.930.4941

Kasey Long, Kasey@thedigitalvoice.co.uk

About Digital Citizens Alliance

The Digital Citizens Alliance is a nonprofit, 501(c)(6) organization that is a consumer - oriented coalition focused on educating the public and policymakers on the threats that consumers face on the Internet. Digital Citizens wants to create a dialogue on the importance for Internet stakeholders— individuals, government, and industry—to make the Web a safer place. Based in Washington, DC, the Digital Citizens Alliance counts among its supporters: private citizens, the health, pharmaceutical, and creative industries as well as online safety experts and other communities focused on Internet safety. Visit us at www.digitalcitizensalliance.org .

About White Bullet Solutions

Founded in 2013 by a leadership team of experienced Intellectual Property lawyers from the media and advertising industries, White Bullet offers companies piracy risk data and protection, brand safety solutions, and full transparency on their advertising placement and digital supply chains.

White Bullet works collaboratively with brands, policymakers, and the advertising industry to safeguard advertising spend and prevent ad placements from appearing on IP Infringing domains and apps. White Bullet is a certified anti-piracy solutions provider under the advertising industry regulator TAG and is a stakeholder to the EU Commission Memorandum of Understanding on Advertising and IPR.

White Bullet comprises IP experts and dedicated technical engineers who specialize in AI, big data models, and predictive machine learning. The team includes highly skilled investigators and data analysts experienced in tackling the funding and distribution of pirated content. With offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles, White Bullet advises policymakers and government bodies on regulatory and compliance programs globally.

Premier League launches ‘Boot Out Piracy’ campaign in Hong Kong for a second year

peter.szyszko@white-bullet.com (Peter Szyszko) — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 16:06:14 GMT

Campaign aims to raise awareness of the dangers of online piracy after research shows a majority of the pirate websites pose considerable risks

The Premier League today launches the second season of its ‘Boot Out Piracy’ campaign in Hong Kong to raise awareness of the dangers of viewing pirate content, as well as the compromised viewing experience offered by illegal streams.

The campaign highlights the risks that fans face by watching Premier League matches via unauthorised websites or streaming devices, including potential exposure to malicious malware or ransomware, which increases their risk of data theft and fraud. Their viewing experience is also likely to be disrupted by broken links, pop-up ads and delays.

The campaign will run across digital platforms, with content featuring some of the Premier League’s top players including Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford, Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah and Tottenham Hotspur’s Son Heung-Min. This is the second time the campaign will run in Hong Kong, having first launched at the start of the 2020/2021 season. Outside of Hong Kong, ‘Boot Out Piracy’ will also run in Malaysia, Indonesia and, for the first time, Singapore.

Premier League General Counsel Kevin Plumb said: “We are launching the ‘Boot Out Piracy’ campaign in Hong Kong for the second year in a row to continue building awareness of the risks involved in watching Premier League matches via illegal streams. We know these sites often contain malicious content and it is important passionate Hong Kong football fans realise that watching Premier League matches through these operators brings security risks and an unreliable viewing experience.

“We are working together with our broadcast partners and local authorities in Hong Kong and throughout Asia to protect fans from accessing pirate sites so they can watch our matches in the best and safest way. Educating fans on the dangers of viewing pirated content is a core part of our anti-piracy programme as well as the significant legal actions we undertake such as blocking sites and the prosecution of sellers of illegal streaming devices.”

External research has shown a clear link between watching pirated content – including pirated Premier League content – and cybersecurity issues. According to research findings from intellectual property and data analytics company, White Bullet Solutions, 60 per cent of the most popular pirate websites in Hong Kong for illegally watching Premier League content carried advertisements considered risky, containing either fraud, malware, adult or gambling content.

White Bullet Solutions founder and chief executive officer Peter Szyszko said: “It is important for people to understand that visiting pirate websites or using pirate apps will greatly increase the risk of falling victim to cybercrime. The type of malware and ransomware we find on pirate websites and apps can be very serious – visiting them can put at risk all sorts of personal or financial information. Our clear message to consumers would be to think twice before taking a big risk and searching for an illegal stream.”

Raising awareness among fans of the risks posed by illegal streams is just one part of the Premier League’s comprehensive anti-piracy work in the region. Since the establishment of its Asia-Pacific office more than two years ago, the Premier League has initiated blocking action against illegal websites in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, and has worked closely with local authorities to bring criminal action against website operators and suppliers of illicit streaming devices across the region, including in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. The League is also a member of the Coalition Against Piracy which represents the creative industries across Asia-Pacific.

The ‘Boot Out Piracy’ campaign was developed with creative agency DDB Worldwide. In Hong Kong, the campaign is a collaboration between the Premier League and local broadcast partner, Now TV, the Pay TV Platform under PCCW Media Limited.

Derek Choi, Head of Pay TV, PCCW Media Limited said: “We are very supportive of the Premier League’s anti-piracy work in Hong Kong and the wider region. As the official broadcaster of the Premier League in Hong Kong, we are committed to providing Hong Kong’s community of passionate football fans with a high-quality viewing experience of all 380 Premier League matches on both Now TV and Now E OTT Platform, with selected matches available live in 4K too.”

- ENDS -

Notes to editors

The Premier League’s anti-piracy programme

The Premier League has one of the most comprehensive anti-piracy programmes in the world, working with broadcast partners and authorities to bring down illegal streams and investigate and prosecute suppliers of illegal streaming services.

Recent actions include forcing the world’s largest infringing streaming app Mobdro to cease all operations after a major investigation and criminal referral by the Premier League and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) resulted in law enforcement action by Spanish police and Europol. Mobdro illegally made available a large catalogue of live TV and video content from around the world – including sports – for use on smart TVs, smartphones, tablets and illicit streaming devices. It was a very popular app across Asia-Pacific including in Hong Kong.

About the Premier League

The Premier League produces some of the most competitive and compelling football in the world. The League and its clubs use the power and popularity of the competition to inspire fans, communities, and partners in the UK and across the world. The Premier League brings people together from all backgrounds. It is a competition for everyone, everywhere and is available to watch in 880 million homes in 188 countries.

About White Bullet Solutions

Founded in 2013 by a leadership team of experienced Intellectual Property lawyers from the media and advertising industries, White Bullet offers companies IP risk protection, Brand Safety and full transparency on their advertising placement and digital supply chains.

White Bullet works collaboratively with brands, policy makers and the advertising industry to safeguard advertising spend and prevent ad placements from appearing on IP Infringing domains and apps. White Bullet is a Digital Advertising Assurance Provider under the TAG Certified Against Piracy Programme and is a stakeholder to the EU Commission Memorandum of Understanding on Advertising and IPR.

White Bullet comprises IP experts with dedicated technical engineers who specialise in AI, big data models and predictive machine learning. The team includes highly skilled investigators and data analysts experienced in tackling the trafficking and distribution of pirated and counterfeit goods. With offices in London, New York and Los Angeles, White Bullet advises policy makers and government bodies on regulatory and compliance programmes globally.

Media Queries Contact

Georgina Mallory

Sarah Sim

georgina.mallory@portland-communications.com

sarah.sim@portland-communications.com

+65 9776 2783

+65 8817 0711

White Bullet and The European Lotteries announce partnership to fight piracy

peter.szyszko@white-bullet.com (Peter Szyszko) — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 11:28:14 GMT

New Title

IP protection company White Bullet and The European Lotteries (EL), announce a collaboration to help fight ad-funded piracy.

White Bullet will track advertising on high-risk pirate websites for EL and provide reports throughout the year. By tracking advertising of EL’s Members and providing information about which websites ads appeared on, White Bullet will help EL’s Members to address any advertising related issues and fight piracy.

The European Lotteries (EL) is the European umbrella organisation of national lotteries operating games of chance, including sports betting, in more than 40 European countries. It is the European lottery and gambling sector’s largest and most representative organisation, and it believes in a high level of consumer protection and responsible gaming, whilst promoting a sustainable and sound gaming model for the benefit of society.

“We are delighted to support the European Lotteries as it helps to ensure a sustainable gaming model and to defund online piracy,” says Peter Szyszko, Founder and CEO, White Bullet. “EL plays an extremely important role within its sector and this partnership will help legitimate organisations to use and protect their IP.”

Arjan van ’t Veer, Secretary General, The European Lotteries, adds: “ We are delighted to partner with White Bullet and have no doubt that its platform and expertise will help us to be successful in our mission to safeguard the interest of our Members and by doing so, protecting their players as well. Brand safety is of paramount importance to us and our Members as we continue to fight illegal offerings. By collaborating with White Bullet, EL Members will have access to benchmark studies and will be able to maintain their high brand safety standards.”

White Bullet has already stopped millions of pounds of ad spend from funding piracy by collaborating with brands, advertisers, regulators and rights owners. Its Intellectual Property Infringement Platform (IPIP) - designed to make the job of detecting fraudulent content easier - helps to take the profit out of Intellectual property crime. By connecting rights owners and the advertising industry with real-time data about piracy risk, so all parties can take action, White Bullet’s solutions allow clients to understand the universe of piracy and to stop it from generating revenue.

For more information:

Peter Szyszko

peter.szyszko@white-bullet.com

Lucy Lenaers – Mathieson

Lucy.mathieson@european-lotteries.eu

About White Bullet Solutions

White Bullet works collaboratively with brands, policy makers and the advertising industry to safeguard advertising spend and prevent ad placements from appearing on IP Infringing domains and apps. White Bullet is a Digital Advertising Assurance Provider under the TAG Certified Against Piracy Programme and is a stakeholder to the EU Commission Memorandum of Understanding on Advertising and IPR.

About the European Lotteries (EL)

EL is the European umbrella organisation of national lotteries operating games of chance for the public benefit. EL has members from more than 40 European countries including all EU Member States. The EU members contribute more than 20 billion EUR p.a. to the state budgets and the funding of sport, culture, social projects, research and causes of general interest. Unlike many commercial online gambling operators, EL members only offer gambling and betting services in the jurisdictions in which they are licensed by the respective national government. Website: www.european-lotteries.org , Twitter @EuropeLotteries , LinkedIn

White Bullet integrates with 4D to enable advertisers to tap into targeted inventory whilst protecting brand reputation

peter.szyszko@white-bullet.com (Peter Szyszko) — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 15:51:01 GMT

The cybersecurity and IP protection company and the contextual outcomes engine join forces to deliver brand-safe advertising at scale

Cybersecurity and IP protection expert, White Bullet, has integrated with leading self-service contextual outcomes engine, 4D, a division of Silverbullet. The integration, which is now live in 4D, enables advertisers to benefit from targeted inventory at scale, whilst avoiding IP-infringement and preventing ads from going to pirate websites and apps.

Advertisers waste billions of dollars on illegal content and on IP-infringing sites. The partnership between Silverbullet and White Bullet empowers brands and agency marketers to gain transparency into their inventory and reduce the risk of wasting budget due to ads being run on websites promoting or enabling pirated content.

4D is a next generation contextual outcomes engine which leverages proven methodologies to drive in-the-moment marketing and brand suitability for digital media buying, with this partnership uniting two companies dedicated to brand suitability for digital advertisers. It delivers products and services designed for the first-party data, post-cookie era; unlocking significant ROI for marketing investments. Through the application of best-in-class technology and expertise, it empowers marketing efforts, enabling brand-safe targeting to drive effective, in-the-moment marketing.

White Bullet offers services to make the job of detecting fraudulent content easier. It helps to combat traditional website piracy and emerging threats, with its IPIP platform leveraging AI and machine learning to uncover and assess IP-infringing content across multiple digital ecosystems. It harvests data from billions of websites and over 50 app stores worldwide, revealing the financial impact of this wide-scale, global problem.

Peter Szyszko, CEO, White Bullet says: “With the cookieless era upon us and the increasing importance of first-party data and opt-in marketing approaches, this partnership with 4D, a division of Silverbullet, will enable organisations to drive in-the-moment advertising which - crucially - avoids IP infringing sites. Companies cannot afford to be wasting money on pirated content and by joining forces with 4D, together we are making in-the-moment, brand-safe marketing possible.”

Silverbullet CSO and 4D co-founder, Umberto Torrielli, adds: “We are building the first of its kind contextual marketplace and our partnership with WhiteBullet is a big step towards our overall goal. In an industry in which brand equity is always at stake, partnering with White Bullet alleviates the concern of running on pirated content; a constant challenge for advertisers. Now, through the 4D Dimensions Marketplace, marketers can tap into data sources such as White Bullet to build contexts that will ensure brands are not unwillingly funding piracy and drive better performance and holistic outcomes through the 4D outcomes engine.”

For more information: peter.szyszko@white-bullet.com

About White Bullet Solutions

Founded in 2012 by a leadership team of experienced Intellectual Property lawyers from the media and advertising industries, White Bullet offers companies IP risk protection, Brand Safety and full transparency on their advertising placement and digital supply chains.

White Bullet works collaboratively with brands, policy makers and the advertising industry to safeguard advertising spend and prevent ad placements from appearing on IP Infringing domains and apps. White Bullet is a Digital Advertising Assurance Provider under the TAG Certified Against Piracy Programme and is a stakeholder to the EU Commission Memorandum of Understanding on Advertising and IPR.

About Silverbullet

Silverbullet is the leading marketing transformation company that helps the world’s biggest brands to improve business outcomes. We reduce the friction across digital marketing, empowering better, faster and smarter marketing decisions. Founded in 2016, the company is headquartered in London, with a team of consultants, product experts, data scientists, and marketing engineers in Milan, Munich, Melbourne and New York.

https://wearesilverbullet.com/

About 4D:

4D is the leading contextual outcomes engine that enables clients to step into the post-cookie, first-party data future with confidence. We bring together the most advanced machine learning and AI technologies to help you reach your customers at the right place, right time, and in the right moment. 4D is a division of Silverbullet.

White Bullet Partners with Peer39 to Help Defund Online Piracy

Wed, 26 May 2021 14:36:07 GMT

Leading IP protection company White Bullet to enable advertisers to enjoy cutting-edge contextual targeting whilst continuing to deliver brand safe solution

Cybersecurity and IP protection company, White Bullet, today announces a partnership with Peer39, the leading global provider of pre-bid keyword, contextual, and brand safety solutions for modern marketers.

Peer39’s Contextual Data Marketplace allows advertisers to explore and discover innovative data providers with scalable, cookie-free categories, and is accessible through all buying and selling platforms.

Meanwhile, White Bullet has already stopped millions of pounds of ad spend from funding piracy by collaborating with brands, advertisers, regulators and rights owners. Its recently launched Intellectual Property Infringement Platform (IPIP) – designed to make the job of detecting fraudulent content easier – helps to take the profit out of intellectual property crime. By connecting rights owners and the advertising industry with real-time data about piracy risk, White Bullet’s solutions allow clients to understand the universe of piracy and to stop it from generating revenue.

This partnership, set within the rapidly shifting landscape of digital marketing, will mean that White Bullet and Peer39 can enable advertisers to reach their desired audiences with precision and scale, safely – unlocking the programmatic ecosystem and giving advertisers direct access to innovative cookie-free data sets from emerging contextual data providers. It will enable clients to elevate media performance whilst defunding pirated content, with White Bullet’s real-time data preventing ads served through Peer39’s integrated partners from going to pirate websites and apps.

With Peer39 serving as the conduit for advertisers to access and utilise diverse contextual data sets, and White Bullet continuing its efforts to ensure that pirate content is defunded on an even larger scale, the partnership will go live in Q3.

Martech Series link to original post :

https://martechseries.com/analytics/white-bullet-partners-with-peer39-to-help-defund-online-piracy/

“We are delighted to help advertisers reach their audiences in the moments that matter, whilst continuing to help defund online piracy,” says Peter Szyszko, Founder and CEO, White Bullet. “This is critical at a time when marketers are looking to explore cookie-free tactics, whilst moving to a modern, contextual approach. We all know that attention and alignment can dramatically increase ROI, yet the risks of pirated content remain – with unscrupulous players continuously attempting new tactics to undermine legitimate advertising and derail media spend into the pockets of criminals.”

Alex White, Chief Operating Officer at Peer39 adds: “We are excited about this partnership. With our goal being to make a large market of cookie-free data sets accessible to all advertisers through all buying and selling platforms, we are also extending our core infrastructure and technology – the tools that allow us to process and understand 1.5 billion web pages per day – whilst enabling our marketplace partners to maintain their proprietary models and IP.”

White Bullet’s platform looks for IP-infringing content, examines each infringement’s context, and determines structural violation on a commercial scale – providing accurate piracy risk scores. It detects piracy across multiple digital ecosystems, remaining up-to-date in real-time, and tracking that all-important financial impact, with AI and machine learning taking the strain.

White Bullet partners with World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to help Prevent Piracy

Wed, 05 May 2021 14:32:22 GMT

Cybersecurity and IP protection company, White Bullet, has announced that it is now collaborating with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to help prevent ad-funded piracy.

WIPO is the global forum for intellectual property (IP) services, policy, information and cooperation – a self-funding agency of the United Nations. Its mission is to lead the development of a balanced and effective international IP system that enables innovation and creativity for the benefit of all.

(This PR release can be read in full: Martech Series , Lovely Mobile News , TechTodayNewspaper and BrandsJournal )

“As a WIPO ALERT member, we are delighted to support this initiative to help defund online piracy,” says Peter Szyszko, Founder and CEO, White Bullet. “WIPO plays an important role by providing a policy forum to shape international IP rules for a changing world, as well as technical infrastructure to connect IP systems and share knowledge, to enable all countries to use IP for economic, social and cultural development.”

White Bullet has already stopped millions of pounds of ad spend from funding piracy by collaborating with brands, advertisers, regulators and rights owners. Its recently launched Intellectual Property Infringement Platform (IPIP) – designed to make the job of detecting fraudulent content easier – helps to take the profit out of Intellectual property crime.

Meanwhile, WIPO ALERT is a secure, online platform to which authorised bodies in WIPO member states can upload details of websites or apps which have been determined to infringe copyright according to national rules. Combined with the millions of infringing web and app pages tracked by White Bullet, partners can be assured of security when blocking ads to pirate services.

By connecting rights owners and the advertising industry with real-time data about piracy risk, so all parties can take action, White Bullet’s solutions allow clients to understand the universe of piracy and to stop it from generating revenue.

White Bullet’s platform looks for IP-infringing content, examines each infringement’s context, and determines structural violation on a commercial scale – providing accurate piracy risk scores based on this analysis. It detects piracy across multiple digital ecosystems, remaining up-to-date in real-time, and tracking that all-important financial impact. AI and machine learning takes the strain.

Streaming pirates and broadcasters have a lot in common – with one big difference

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 13:40:35 GMT

Contrary to the popular saying, crime does sometimes pay.

Based on our own research, the top pirate web domains – the ones people turn to when they don’t want to pay to watch the football, the boxing, the new Hollywood film – earn around $7 million in ad revenue annually.

So there’s money in crime, but that doesn’t mean crime is necessarily easy. Just like legitimate operators, pirates have a business to run, and it’s clear they are committed to their work. They hook their sites up to programmatic ad channels to generate revenue. They promote their product through search and social media – building a brand, acquiring an audience. Some even sell subscriptions.

Then there is the more technical side: they develop apps, create mirror sites to evade blocking orders, and constantly obscure and relaunch their activities to stay ahead of the authorities.

In other words, give or take a few wrong-side-of-the-law contingencies, pirates have a lot of the same operational challenges as legal broadcasters, and many of the same tools at their disposal to market and monetise their channels. You might almost admire their style.

But the glaring difference between the legitimate broadcasters and the illegal streaming companies is that the outlaws don’t pay a penny for the content they distribute. That’s a big item off the balance sheet, and it’s the reason why they thrive, and why their success does so much harm. When you are stealing and re-selling someone else’s product, fees, royalties and regulation don’t mean a great deal to you.

Given the popularity of illegal streaming, it’s tempting to conclude that those things don’t mean a great deal to many viewers either. What could we possibly steal from the billionaire football clubs, the multi-millionaire promoters and the broadcasting conglomerates that they couldn’t afford to lose?

But the fact is, IP doesn’t only benefit the rich. It bankrolls the creation of all sport, all art, and pays both big salaries and small ones. The criminal operators who siphon off their own ill-gotten share of the proceeds may look like Robin Hood figures, liberating content from the hands of those who would charge for it, but they owe their entire existence to the legitimate channels whose content they are hijacking.

It’s World Intellectual Property Day today (April 26), shining an annual light on the role intellectual property plays in the global economy and the work it does in protecting the interests of customers, culture, SMEs – even the environment and indigenous communities. If nothing else, it offers a reminder of how broad the benefits of IP actually are.

Perhaps it’s too much to expect a fan streaming a Champions League match to think very hard about the economy such activities disrupt at all levels. But like the recent European Super League proposal so many fans hated, this kind of IP infringement reduces the amount of money that trickles down through sport to smaller teams and grass-roots initiatives. And like the football agents of whom so many disapprove, it drains enormous sums from the game without conspicuously putting anything in.

And that’s just football. The unfortunate fact is, all industries show a similar pattern of revenue disruption when pirates get their claws in.

As a company that devotes huge time and expertise to tracking and monitoring the ever-shifting sprawl of copyright-infringing content on the internet, we get to see it for what it is: a systematic criminal enterprise that leeches vast, quantifiable sums from IP owners all over the world, and the industries, wages and ongoing innovations that depend on them. The fact that these pirates are organised, even professional, shouldn’t obscure their negative impact.

So, on behalf of rights owners, authorities and right-thinking companies in the ad chain, we continue to work to attack the basis of their business, de-indexing pirates from search engines, demonetising them by cutting off their ad supply. And because we survey the entire landscape, we can do much of this in real time, cutting the revenue lines and marketing channels on which they depend, often within hours of detecting illegal activity.

Crime pays, but it does so with money that, in the proper hands, could have done a lot of good. We might never entirely stop it, but we can all stop supporting it, and some of us will keep on doing our best to fight it.

Real-Time Piracy Enforcement: The Answer to Sports Broadcasters’ Vengeful Prayers

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 10:12:30 GMT

The window of opportunity in elite sport is incredibly narrow, in every sense: careers are short; entire matches turn on split-second incidents; and mass content piracy surges up around a particular event and then disappears again like smoke.

Those first two facts of sporting life, however cruel, are part of the fabric of any game. But the third – the everyday household piracy that drains vast subscription, pay-per-view and advertising revenue from professional sport – is a blight on the business, and it is something we can tackle.

Time, of course, is of the essence. Every time a sporting event takes place that is worthy of being broadcast, there is an online smash and grab. One or many pirate sites prepare to pirate the stream; they publicize it via sites such as Reddit from around 48 hours ahead and share the spectacle in real-time with many thousands of people.

Then it all vanishes until the next time – ghost sites that materialize for the duration of the match and then evaporate, or sometimes shape-shift back into apparently respectable domains.

Like so much on the internet, this activity imagines it is covert, but it actually takes place in plain sight – if you know where to look. A company like ours is able to monitor these pirate feeds: we know where they are, how many people are watching them, who operates them and how they make their money – usually through programmatic advertising, typically from careless legitimate brands whose ads have washed up on the internet’s wilder shores.

In their vengeful fantasies, broadcasters picture themselves simply cutting these streams dead, turning off the spectacle in mid-flow. It seems like a tall order – pirates are clever, and the internet is less controllable than that – but it is an increasingly realistic prospect.

On behalf of broadcasters, we can tackle a real-time pirate event on two fronts, through a strategy of demonetization and de-indexing that uses all the intelligence we pick up from watching the pirates come and go.

Read the full post @ AIAuthority

Why brands must wake up to the evolving world of online piracy

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 10:23:17 GMT

Read the full post @ Marketing Donut

Digital piracy is now happening on a scale like never before.

With close to a billion dollars in advertising revenue found to be going to pirate websites each year, brand marketers need to understand the risk of associating with piracy and get wise to the tactics used by these online fraudsters.

Ads from household-name brands are alarmingly common on pirate websites, pouring millions of dollars into this illegal ecosystem. On top of this, premium brands are increasingly advertising with pirate mobile platforms, including over-the-top media streaming (OTT) and connected TV. Ads from premium brands are up to four times more prevalent in the mobile space.

Over 3000 Brands Protected by White Bullet’s Newly Launched Platform

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 11:36:39 GMT

Read the full post @ Martech Series

Take-up of the new solution IPIP reflects the fact that dynamic piracy detection remains an urgent issue for brands and rights owners

White Bullet announces that it has already helped to stop 44 million dollars of ad spend from funding online piracy by collaborating with brands, advertisers, regulators and rights owners. Its recently launched Intellectual Property Infringement Platform (IPIP) – designed to make the job of detecting digital piracy more straightforward – is now being used by clients such as the City of London Police, Hollywood studios and real-time bidding advertising platforms.

White Bullet Launches Intellectual Property Infringement Platform to Help Combat Piracy

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 11:26:07 GMT

Read the full post @ ExchangeWire

White Bullet has already stopped millions of dollars of ad spend from funding piracy by collaborating with brands, advertisers, regulators and rights owners. It has now launched the Intellectual Property Infringement Platform (IPIP) as its flagship anti-piracy service, designed to make the job of detecting fraudulent content easier.

Peter Szyszko, CEO, White Bullet, explains: “IPIP is a tool that can be used by regulators and online intermediaries as well as IP rights owners. Companies in the programmatic ad supply chain can now seamlessly filter out infringing publishers by deciding piracy thresholds and drawing real-time data from IPIP via their APIs.

Read the full post @ ExchangeWire

Ad Disruption is the Key to Disrupting the Mother of all Black Markets

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 10:20:11 GMT

Read the full post @ The Drum

Live sport is the mother of all black markets, accounting for thousands of highly illegal but user-friendly domains and apps worldwide - some of them offered on a subscription basis, but very many moving stealthily towards a revenue model driven by big-brand advertising.

Western sports leagues, whose content is in particularly great demand all over the world, wrestle constantly with the global appeal of their pirated content. Given the boom in live streaming through mobile devices, app piracy is the growing threat. So content owners’ understandable impulse is to identify the apps infringing their copyrights and insist the relevant app stores take them down. Problem solved.

Read the full post @ The Drum

How ads fund football piracy

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 14:21:39 GMT

Read the full post @ The Drum

How ads fund football piracy – and how to counter it . Widespread football piracy threatens the business of football – the role of advertisers in fuelling piracy has gone unexamined. The Drum looks at how football piracy is kept alive, and what can be done to tame it.

Football piracy is rife. A third of adult English Premier League (EPL) fans (and two thirds of young ones) say they watch an illegal football stream at least once a month; you'd fill Wembley Stadium (capacity 90,000) around 79 times with the average pirate audience of an EPL game. Meanwhile, some games are being leaked as part of a geopolitical proxy war. And illegal streaming will continue as long as advertisers continue paying for pirate attention.

Read the full post @ The Drum

In-housing programmatic? Don’t forget about internet safety

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 08:55:31 GMT

Read the full post @ Adhugger

Content piracy, and the ads that fund it, should be a major issue for brands taking digital advertising in-house. When advertising goes astray, it can bankroll organised crime, tarnish a brand, even bring the police to the door.

In-housing the buying and planning of programmatic advertising has been among the top priorities for many brands over the past year or two, says Peter Szyszko, founder and CEO White Bullet.

Read the full post @ Adhugger

Pirate apps funded by brand advertising

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:52:01 GMT

On mobile and other connected devices, legitimate applications are critical to the success of IP rights owners and streamed content companies across the world. They allow for an unprecedented level of flexibility as well as higher resolutions and better interactivity than that offered by even smart TV.

But streamed in-app content piracy is already a huge problem. As we’ve seen, for anyone with the will to do so, pirate apps are very easy to get hold of, their stolen content invariably funded by unsuspecting advertisers who assume their programmatic ads are going to law-abiding, IP-respecting publishers.

Read the full article over at Mobile Marketing Magazine

Connect with us on LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/whitebullet-solutions-limited

Piracy in your pocket – the brave new world of in-app content

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 16:36:24 GMT

Read the full post @ Mobile Marketing Magazine

Peter Szyszko, Founder and CEO of White Bullet, says that with ads from big-name brands regularly detected in apps carrying pirated sport and entertainment content, brands need to keep a close eye on exactly where their in-app ads appear.

Digital technology is invariably sold to us as a clean, gleaming thing. Look at our phones, our smart TVs, our set-top gadgets and premium content hubs. What could be shinier or more reassuring?

But as a technology and data analytics company that tracks the astonishingly dynamic online piracy landscape, we see a far dirtier side of digital, characterised by stolen content, dodgy sites, big-time fraud and the pervasive influence of organised crime.

Read the full post @ Mobile Marketing Magazine

Why brand safety requires human and technological investment

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 16:09:53 GMT

By Peter Szyszko, CEO at White Bullet Solutions - Read the full post @ New Digital Age

The great thing about AI is that it tackles issues on a scale that lies beyond human capability. Certainly, mere mortals cannot detect, nor stop, the millions of pirate web pages created daily nor the billions of ads funding them.

This growing problem sits at the intersection of IP protection, brand safety and advertising transparency – and it can only be tackled using AI.

This is why our company has developed solutions using machine learning so we can address a global problem, assess billions of data points simultaneously and rapidly scale. We have brought on board a new team of machine learning experts in recent months to grow even faster. The fact is, highly dynamic pirated digital content is created at tremendous scale and funded by algorithms serving ads as fast as visitors load web pages. So unless you have a global army of people, AI needs to play its part.

Read the full post @ New Digital Age

Ad-Supported Piracy Is Thriving, Thanks To Programmatic Ad Tech

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 14:50:46 GMT

Original article posted on Forbes

"Thanks to programmatic ad tech, piracy sites are thriving and making more ad revenue than ever before. In 2013, this study from Digital Citizens Alliance documented that “Piracy Websites Roped In $227 Million in Ad Revenues.” That was right before programmatic ad exchanges took off in earnest; and digital ad spending in the U.S. was only $43 billion. Since that time, digital ad spend has tripled to $125 billion in 2020 and piracy sites are more easily able to scale their revenue operations. Programmatic ad tech automated the buying and selling of digital ads across vast numbers of sites; it also enabled a larger variety of advertisers to buy and place ads. This means piracy sites are now able to sell even more ad impressions to more unsuspecting advertisers."

Read the full article here on Forbes

Don’t let internet safety sink your in-house programmatic ambitions

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 14:16:48 GMT

In-housing programmatic has been among the top priorities for many brands over the past 12 months, and the trend is still quietly gaining traction.

Forrester has predicted that in 2020, a third of in-house agencies will include media operations that control large amounts of their paid media budget. Why do it? For the savings; for transparency and peace of mind in a time of dwindling client-agency trust; for the sake of data control and integration of marketing and advertising.

Many of the challenges of going in-house are widely known - building the team, the platform, the strategy, the data governance. But we need to add another less-mentioned deal-breaker that all brands should bear in mind: the challenge of advertising safely online. We’ll break down what in-housers need, in three steps:

A dynamic list of IP-infringing, age-inappropriate and sexually explicit websites and publishers. This is to filter inventory and keep ads away from risky websites. Note the ‘dynamic’ part. Static lists won’t help, because these guys move around constantly to intercept your ad budgets.
A post-bid monitoring solution. See where ads landed and establish which partner, affiliate or agent was responsible.
Complementary brand safety tools for ad partners. Most brands aren’t going to be fully in-house. They need their partners to be taking the same precautions that they are.

These are major issues for brands taking digital advertising in-house. When advertising goes astray, it can fund crime, tarnish a brand, even bring the police to the door. Linguistic brand-safety tools aren’t enough to keep you safe. Talk to White Bullet about how to build online defences that really work.

White Bullet's programme with the EU Commission is moving the dial to success.

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 10:54:58 GMT

Lessons learned from a year of working with the EU Commission under the Memorandum of Understanding on Online Advertising and Intellectual Property Rights on the Online Advertising Market .

The MOU ( signed in 2018 ) marked a rare opportunity to build a cooperation program between advertising intermediaries, advertisers, technology providers, and industry associations to prevent ad placement on IP infringing websites and apps.

Ads placed on IP infringing websites and apps directly fund piracy .

The issue is something that brands should be acutely aware of as often their advertisers and supply chain partners are a big part of the problem.

Misplaced Ads:

Give unwarranted credibility to pirate and IP infringing websites and apps - this confuses consumers , who may mistakenly believe that such websites or apps provide access to legal content, goods or services, and erodes their confidence.
Damage the reputation of legitimate brands , which are often unaware of where their ads end up.
Damage the status, and undermine the value of, the advertising industry.

The first year of this ongoing programme, targeted at brands and advertisers operating in the EU, has already seen success.

Our data shows there was a substantial decrease in the proportion of ads collected from premium household name brands (Major Brands) that are based or headquartered in the EU, falling from 93% to 75% in the first six months of 2019.

As the process evolves and expands, we are continuing to see positive results in our piracy landscape analytics. All thanks to the changing habits of advertisers, brands and those intermediaries in the supply chain that are on board with us and taking advantage of our AI-driven IP infringement focused technology.

We are delivering transparency and shedding light on the complexity of the piracy landscape, thus allowing regulation and compliance efforts around IP infringement to become more productive.

However, to get the most significant impact, more intermediaries and stakeholders need to get on board. It's a considerable effort and a multi-targeted "clean up" job that needs breadth and support to succeed to its full potential.

What the EU Commission has put together is laudable, it is working, and we are proud to be able to support as a technology partner.

We hope that governments around the world are taking note of the success of the EU Commission's programme so far. What works here can work anywhere.

The 2019 Study on the Impact of the Memorandum of Understanding on Online Advertising and Intellectual Property Rights on the Online Advertising Market is now available and free to download.

For more information about White Bullet's work, our technology, the study and the MOU, please contact us .

White Bullet works with the EU Commission to produce study

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 16:22:21 GMT

White Bullet is proud to have worked with the EU Commission to produce the 2019 Study on the Impact of the Memorandum of Understanding on Online Advertising and Intellectual Property Rights on the Online Advertising Market .

The MOU (signed in 2018) seeks to build cooperation between advertising intermediaries, advertisers, technology providers and industry associations to prevent ads being placed on IP infringing websites and apps.

Digital advertising:

Gives undue credibility to such websites and apps - this confuses consumers, who may mistakenly believe that such websites or apps provide access to legal content, goods or services, and erodes their confidence.
Damages the reputation of legitimate brands, which are often unaware of where their ads end up.
Damages the reputation, and undermines the value of, the advertising industry.

The first year of this ongoing programme has already seen traction, with engagement from a range of stakeholders. As this program evolves and expands, we expect to see the impact of the MOU develop.

Due to our leading AI driven IP infringement focused technology, our work with advertisers, brands and intermediaries and our partnerships with industry and government bodies, we are gaining ground in producing transparency and shedding light on the complexity of the piracy landscape. Thus allowing regulation and compliance efforts around IP infringement to become more effective.

For more information about the study and the MOU, please visit the study page on the Publication Office website or download the study below.

Brands beware Connected TV and OTT - the booming new frontier of ad-funded piracy

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 11:09:02 GMT

Marketers are increasingly alert to the threat of misplaced advertising funding pirate content on the web. But ads from household-name brands are up to five times more common on pirate content streamed through Connected TV and Over-The-Top devices, according to research by content piracy experts White Bullet that identifies TV apps as a very real new threat to the safety of premium brands.

Up to 25% of ads detected in apps carrying pirated sport and entertainment content come from big-name brands, compared to just 5% of the ads on web-based pirate streaming sites, White Bullet has found. But in spite of massive and accelerating consumer uptake of streaming content online, most brands and ad networks are entirely unaware that their advertising is bankrolling illegal content in the OTT / CTV space. Overall, around 60% of advertising in-app bears a brand of some kind, the rest being sponsored articles, porn or fraud and malware.

This picture of the previously undiagnosed TV app piracy problem comes as White Bullet offers its in-app ad-tracking service to first movers - the first of its kind and a lifeline to brands and ad providers who have previously been oblivious to the galloping levels of ad-funded piracy already detectable in the CTV / OTT ecosystem.

TV apps sign up with ad networks to draw advertising in the same way websites do, but the complexity of tracking CTV / OTT advertising means that, until now, there has been no way to tell whether or not ad-funded apps were streaming legitimate, legal content.

“We can clearly see a shift taking place towards a different avenue of piracy,” says White Bullet product director Dana Neale. “There is a lot more branded advertising in app, and that is because there is almost no transparency in the ad supply chain, and unlike web piracy there are no law-enforcement programmes to tackle pirate connected TV.”

To find out how you can protect your brand in In-App / OTT / CTV, please get in touch

Brands will guard their own supply chain if ad networks don’t

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 14:22:56 GMT

We recently spoke about a piece in Digiday that put its finger on marketers’ dread of the inappropriate screenshot capturing their brand up close against something awful. This has been preying on our mind, especially in the context of the rising trend of brands taking their programmatic activity in-house .

“Marketers have let someone else spend their money for far too long,” said ad fraud researcher and consultant Augustine Fou in the Digiday piece. “They need to learn how to look at the data and do their own due diligence.”

Many brands are contemplating doing exactly this, which prompts two thoughts. One is that ad exchanges clearly need to give brands better protection and transparency if they don’t want those clients to take programmatic matters into their own hands.

With real-time buying comes the need for real-time verification of publishers. If exchanges do not have accurate and dynamic risk assessments about the publishers to which they serve ads, then both their advertisers and their own place in the supply chain will suffer.

And the second thought is directed to those brands that do turn to in-housing to take ownership of their ad supply chain, and it is this: the internet poses a constantly shifting array of risks to brands, and it takes great vigilance to monitor them all. Both go-it-alone brands and ad networks have a need for technology like ours, which uses AI to crawl the web night and day, maintaining dynamic lists of the web’s unsafe publishers.

If either of those descriptions applies to you, we’d love to talk to you about how we can provide the trust and transparency you are looking for. Get in touch !

Is your brand safety vendor letting you down on piracy?

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 12:32:31 GMT

A recent Digiday piece talked about marketers ‘living in constant fear of the screenshot’ - the juxtaposition of their brand with undesirable content. “Marketers clearly care about this brand safety problem,” said Danny Rogers, chief technology officer for disinformation watchdog Global Disinformation Index. “But the tools they are sold are so inadequate and their understanding of the open web is so limited that the outcome of it all is 180 degrees from the intent.”

They don’t have the highly dynamic tracking or legal knowledge to spot high-risk websites running pirate or fraudulent content. As long as their keyword search checks out, they will still put a brand’s advertising on an illegal and dangerous domain. Every day, we see numerous examples of ads on pirate websites that brand safety companies have waved through, including sites showcasing stolen Premier League streams and bogus blogs and e-commerce domains set up as fronts for pirate activity.
Keyword blocking can easily find fault with respectable and trustworthy publishers and content, depriving an advertiser of valuable opportunities and millions of eyeballs.

Even brands who are satisfied with their brand safety companies in other respects need extra eyes on the piracy problem. This kind of brand threat is astonishingly dynamic and requires both constant, highly specialised internet vigilance and legal analysis. Pirates are ingenious and devious, and this is an increasingly substantial criminal business .

Unlike the companies that depend solely on contextual word analysis to spot trouble, White Bullet uses AI to crawl the web night and day, maintains dynamic lists of the web’s unsafe publishers and draws on vast legal experience, with vastly more robust results.

Brands shouldn’t depend on inadequate brand safety tools to protect themselves online. Get in touch to understand the real risks of online piracy and the real remedies.

UK Gambling regulator fines gambling brand which failed to manage third party websites on which it advertised

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Fri, 29 May 2020 10:19:49 GMT

Earlier this month of May, the UK Gambling Commission fined the gambling company FSB £600,000 for responsibility failures surrounding its advertising in the UK, including misplacing ads on pirate websites.

Is your brand safe online?

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Fri, 15 May 2020 13:44:33 GMT

The trend continues. More ads and more premium ads to pirate sites suggesting ads are finding their way anywhere in order to boost brand visibility even if that is at odds with brand safety obligations.

For help with the above data or to check if your brand is impacted, contact us here

Brands contacted in Q1 2020 continue to fund piracy despite being given clear evidence of misplacement

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 05 May 2020 13:37:04 GMT

White Bullet’s mission is to demonetise online piracy. We set up White Bullet with a vision to provide more transparency to advertisers around online intellectual property infringement: for them to find out when and how their ads appear on high risk infringing publishers, and to make it easier for their ad partners to filter out pirate publishers with dynamic feeds of pirate websites.

An easy to integrate AI-driven technological solution, to remove any sense of confusion that may arise from static inaccurate lists. Not only does this support the industry’s moral duty to stop ad revenue to criminals but directly help brands achieve campaign safety and provides stronger opportunities to improve ROI by accessing legitimate paying audiences.

However, it is harder to fix this problem of ad funded piracy when brands and their advertising companies refuse to adopt effective measures and continue to misplace ads. In many cases ad placement partners state their clients – the brands – don’t acknowledge the problem of piracy as serious enough to merit action.

White Bullet, along with regulators like TAG, continues to reach out to brands and agencies to raise awareness when brands’ ads appear on pirate publishers. Systematic outreach has been ongoing through 2019 and stepped up in Q1 2020 with more direct outreach by enforcement agencies like the UK IP Office.

When brands are aware of the problem and consequences it is more likely they will take responsibility and demand their ad partners take long-overdue action for their business safety, as well as that of their consumers. Naturally, most brands are concerned when they first hear their online ads fund piracy and seek further evidence, but despite this many don’t take steps to resolve the problem. Significantly, despite outreach over several months, branded ads on pirate websites remains as high as before outreach began in 2019 – representing around 40% of all advertising on the top pirate publishers globally.

Worryingly, 57% of premium brands contacted in Q1 2020 continue to fund piracy despite being given clear evidence of misplacement. Of those, 7% refused to engage at all, saying they had more important matters to deal with than piracy – and many of these are the top supporters of pirate websites by ad volume.

Only 3% of premium brands contacted positively engaged and took various forms of action, with no further ads placed on pirate publishers.

These percentages must be turned around to stop piracy and protect brands.

With the current pandemic, businesses do have other issues to manage, but putting brand reputation at risk during a crisis when consumers are looking for leadership, seems to make no sense. When marketing budgets are being slashed across the board, stopping precious ad budget going to criminals should also be a priority for advertisers’ CFOs. The suitability of a webpage is key to advertising ROI and of course brand safety, but when a website is infringing the law, none of its webpages should ever be deemed suitable.

3 practical steps that brands can take to protect themselves and stop funding piracy:

Check where your ads are going - seek full ad placement auditing data including on your ad partners own partners.
Ensure your ad partners filter out pirate websites - demand up to date dynamic pirate list feeds.
Monitor your ad partners remain compliant - protect your brand at all stages and across all digital ad campaigns

For help with the above data or to check if your brand is impacted, contact us here .

What does it take to stop brands funding piracy?

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 09:44:06 GMT

Following on from our recent analyses , which showed a significant increase in advertising impressions on pirate websites (Q4 2019 to Q1 2020), we have delved deeper into the geographies, ad types and companies funding these illegal publishers.

We looked at the top 5,000 highest risk pirate websites from the top six countries by ad spend.

Ad impressions on these pirate websites are up 43% on average across the six markets since Q4 2019, representing 4.3 billion ad impressions in Q1 2020. The largest increases are in France (85%) and the US (52%).

AD IMPRESSIONS ON PIRATE PUBLISHERS - TOP 6 AD MARKETS

We then drilled into the type of advertising leading the increases between quarters on these websites.

Generic clickbait grew 113% and ads associated with fraud/malware grew 37%, indicating the risky end of the ad industry is jumping to capitalise on unwitting consumers who are spending more time online.

Despite news that brands are currently cutting spend on digital advertising, unexpectedly - and worryingly - ads from premium brands have also increased by a huge 30%. It seems brands, like malware providers, continue to target consumers no matter what the context of the publisher page. This lack of diligence by brands’ ad partners towards properly assessing publisher suitability and safety for their clients, is putting brands at risk, due to their funding criminals, and damaging their clients’ reputations in the eyes of consumers.

It may be easy to guess the ad sectors driving this increase in premium brands on pirate websites. Reflecting the current climate of shopping from home, ads in this sector grew by a phenomenal 96% to become by far the largest sector in Q1 2020 (second largest sector in Q4).

The second largest sector by ad impression volume in Q1 2020 is Arts & Entertainment (including streaming and gaming), which increased by 76%. Automotive, Travel (including holiday deals) and Personal Finance related ads also each grew significantly although with fewer overall ads (2176%, 407% and 622% respectively). It is perhaps understandable that many brands in these sectors have sought to target a broader audience given they have been hit the hardest by the pandemic. However, senior management should seriously consider whether a desperate attempt to spread ads to illegal websites is a smart strategy.

Request data about your brand: Contact Us

TOP 5 AD SECTORS ON PIRATE PUBLISHERS – TOP 6 AD MARKETS

Our mission here at White Bullet is to demonetise piracy by raising awareness with brands and their ad partners about ad misplacement. Expanding the collaboration between White Bullet, advertisers, IP owners and regulators will create a safer online environment for brands and consumers, stop funding crime and grow the legitimate IP market.

Armed with the most accurate and up to date information means brands can take control of their ad spend and digital brand safety.

For real time brand specific data and to compare against competitors, contact Contact Us

Protecting advertisers and brands from digital piracy.

Get in touch now

Brands are paying their advertising partners to put their brand reputation at risk

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 10:41:04 GMT

As offices, pubs, gyms and shops close in the thousands, the world has moved indoors and online.

More people are taking to living life on the web and that means the Internet pirates are benefitting. White Bullet's Q1 2020 data shows a 50% traffic increase to the top pirate websites since the last quarter in the US and UK alone.

Much of this is due to consumers looking for more available free content. More pageviews equates to more advertising displayed to those new website visitors, and more eyeballs means more money to the pirates and the ad companies placing those ads.

There have been more than 6 billion ad impressions on pirate websites since lockdown in Q1 alone.

Find out if your advertising partners are placing your ads on pirate websites – email us for a FREE digital HealthCheck for your brand.

Branded ads on high-risk pirate websites have gone up by 163% since December 2019 before lockdowns began. This is despite loud and clear calls from the advertising industry for ad companies to treat pirate websites as they treat other publishers of illegal and inappropriate content and stop serving them ads .

White Bullet has been measuring the rise of ads belonging to or representing premium household name brands, and it’s a cause for concern. Premium brand ads increased by 150% on high-risk websites in that same period.

Ad companies are not going to stop placing premium brand ads on pirate websites voluntarily. Why would they? These ad companies get paid for all ad impressions.

The only way ad-funded piracy will stop is for brands to lean heavily on the partners within their ad supply chain and tell them to prevent ads on pirate websites . Ad companies will listen to their clients, the brands that ultimately pay them. The problem is that brands do not have transparency regarding their adverts on pirate websites.

Get transparency on the high-risk websites where your ads have been found and who placed them – email us for a FREE digital HealthCheck for your brand.

White Bullet already provides this data to brands to help them identify such instances of non-compliance by their ad partners. This is important to help promote self-regulation. Otherwise regulators are threatening to step in.

Regulators seek to stop ad funding to websites run by cybercriminals . These websites hurt vulnerable consumers as the websites carry data miners, browser hijackers, phishing campaigns and malware. White Bullet's latest data shows 20% of pirate websites carry malware designed to steal private information .

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) , amongst others, already track non-compliant brands and their ad partners that continue to support pirate websites. They have launched recent enforcement programmes to address persistently non-compliant companies targeting them for outreach and action .

Find out if your brand is at risk – email us for a FREE digital HealthCheck for your brand.

Brands must demand compliance from their digital ad partners to specifically stop ad placement on pirate websites . Failure to do so harms their reputation with consumers and risks scrutiny from regulators .

To protect their reputation, brands must track their ad partners’ compliance via transparency data and evidence when their ads appear on pirate websites.

Protecting advertisers and brands from digital piracy.

Get in touch now

Operation Creative prevents millions of pounds ending up in the hands of criminals

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 14:37:46 GMT

Research shows that there has been an 87% drop in adverts for licensed gambling operators being displayed on illegal sites that infringe copyright in the last twelve months. (Posted 13 Jun 2017 - read original article here)

A ground-breaking police operation, run by the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit ( PIPCU ), that disrupts illegal websites providing pirated access to films, TV, books, music and games has seen major success.

Action was taken to help stop licensed gambling operators inadvertently providing revenue to those committing crime online, which runs counter to their licensing objective under the Gambling Act 2005 to “keep crime out of gambling”. Through the Infringing Website List (IWL), gambling operators are provided with an up-to-date list of copyright infringing sites, allowing them to stop advert placement on these illegal websites.

The research was carried out by White Bullet ; a global data company that specialise in brand safety solutions and provide transparency on digital advertising on IP infringing websites.

In October 2016, the Gambling Commission made placing digital adverts responsibly a licensing condition for all gambling operators targeting consumers in Great Britain. This condition means that licensees must not place adverts on illegal websites and must take all reasonable steps to ensure that third parties under contract with them take the same approach. These illegal websites harm not only the UK’s creative industries but also the UK consumer.

Data was gathered on 40 gambling operators who hold a Gambling Commission licence and are current members of the IWL. The results are positive for these gambling companies whose aim is to stop their advertising budgets ending up with criminals.

The Gambling Commission has been working with industry to raise awareness of the new condition and requirements and has already taken targeted interventions to ensure compliance.

PIPCU launched Operation Creative and the IWL in 2013 to tackle the funding of illegal streaming websites that adversely impact on the UK’s creative industries. This is a police endorsed list of websites which host copyright infringing content and is used by advertisers and advertising networks to avoid placing adverts on them and therefore passing revenue to them.

Research carried out earlier this year by White Bullet showed that there has been a 64% decrease in advertising from the UK’s top ad spending companies on copyright infringing websites.

Acting Detective Superintendent Peter Ratcliffe, Head of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), said:

“The success of a strong relationship built between PIPCU and The Gambling Commission can be seen by these figures. This is a fantastic example of a joint working initiative between police and an industry regulator.

“We commend the 40 gambling companies who are already using the Infringing Website List and encourage others to sign up.

“We will continue to encourage all UK advertisers to become a member of the Infringing Website List to ensure they’re not inadvertently funding criminal websites”

Tim Moss, CEO of the UK Intellectual Property Office, said:

“Partnership work is clearly having a major impact on IP crime across the UK. PIPCU and the Gambling Commission have cut off yet another illicit revenue stream for unscrupulous IP thieves.

“The government and its partners will continue to fight IP crime in all its forms. Those wishing to profit from the hard work of others will not have an easy ride.”

Paul Hope, Gambling Commission programme director said:

“The Gambling Commission is committed to ensuring gambling is free from crime. This is why we brought in a requirement that all operators must not place digital advertisements on websites providing unauthorised access to copyrighted content.

“The result of this latest initiative speaks for itself, and we are delighted with these figures.”

Peter Szyszko, CEO of White Bullet said:

“White Bullet’s research and analysis shows just how much progress can be made when the industry comes together. Many gambling companies now recognise the damage to brand equity associated with advertising on illegal websites and don’t want their ad budget supporting criminals.

“The most significant progress has been made where brands work with the IWL and use White Bullet’s data to identify ad networks and affiliates that repeatedly put their brands at risk. Brands and ad companies now have tools to protect themselves and consumers.”

Protecting advertisers and brands from digital piracy.

Get in touch now

Follow the money to defund piracy and protect the public online

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 16:48:28 GMT

IP infringement is a major prohibitor to business growth. Find out how White Bullet Solutions is taking the battle to digital pirates on behalf of the business community

Connecting for Growth interviewed Peter Szyszko , Founder of White Bullet Solutions, as part of the Connecting for Growth campaign, which is putting a spotlight on some of the world’s most promising business ideas. Look out for more insights from top entrepreneurs in the coming weeks.

Read the full post on the Telegraph website.

Protecting advertisers and brands from digital piracy.

Get in touch now

Working with bet365 to gain affiliate transparency

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 15:12:42 GMT

bet365 has renewed its longstanding partnership with White Bullet to protect against misplaced advertising on high risk publishers.

The partnership targets multiple ecosystems and enhanced promotion compliance in tune with increased industry regulation.

bet365’s highly proactive approach to compliance utilises White Bullet’s risk scoring technology to minimise advertising the brand on high risk IP infringing websites.

Using White Bullet’s brand protection and compliance tool, bet365 continues to have full transparency on affiliate partner programmes across all ecosystems and multiple risk segments including IP infringing, Sexually Explicit and Age Inappropriate content.

This will help bet365 to ensure its advertising and promotions are legally compliant, prioritise the action required to deliver Positive Customer Engagement, Brand and Customer Safety and uphold internal standards.

White Bullet’s proprietary software uses AI to analyse publisher content, advertising and promotions in real time, providing unique and dynamic risks scores as to the compliance and safety of each.

White Bullet’s technology not only provides full transparency on where ads and promotions are placed by partners and ad brokers, but also screenshot evidence and risk scores making it faster and easier for compliance teams to prioritise and manage safety programmes accurately.

Protecting advertisers and brands from digital piracy.

Get in touch now

White Bullet: IPA Bellwether Report and the impact on our industry

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 09:35:10 GMT

The IPA Bellwether Q4 2019 Report, released today 15th January 2020, has revealed a 4% overall increase in marketing budgets, the first such increase since the first quarter of the year. Growth is anticipated to accelerate through 2020 as the business cycle recovers from its current soft spell.

"The IPA Bellwether Report’s finding of renewed growth in marketing budgets, and particularly those allocated to internet marketing, offers a welcome shot of positivity for a UK economy that has been subdued by uncertainty for three years. But as advertisers finally begin to release the handbrake on their marketing investments, they should remember that opportunists thrive in busy markets. Illegal domains, misplaced ads and IP infringement boom when advertising is strong, and as marketing activity increases, so does the risk to brands. For any advertiser, the gearing up of online marketing requires a parallel investment in safety and compliance, to ensure ads, campaigns and brands do not fall prey to the hidden dangers of a high-risk publisher landscape.”

Peter Szyszko, CEO and founder, White Bullet Solutions

Read full article on Exchangewire

Brands may not realise that their ads are being placed on IP infringing sites

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 15:33:38 GMT

Are you running a digital ad campaign for your company? IP expert Peter Szyszko explains the risks of advertising on third-party websites

Peter Szyszko from White Bullet Solutions alerts about the risks that many EU companies face when setting up digital ad campaigns on third-party websites.

Premier League clubs still taking money from blacklisted online betting firm

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 11:41:32 GMT

www.thetimes.co.uk

Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur football clubs have been accused of “sanitising” the reputation of a betting firm whose UK operations were suspended this weekend after a Sunday Times investigation.

1XBET ads appeared on 1,200 ‘pirate’ sites in past six months

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 11:36:00 GMT

Torrentfreak.com

As pressure builds on several Premiership clubs to stop doing business with 1XBET, the scale of the company's advertising on 'pirate' sites has been revealed. According to brand protection company White Bullet, 1XBET ads appeared on 1,200 'pirate' platforms in the past six months, of which 13% were "high risk sites" involved in unlicensed sports streaming.

Predictions 2020: Industry experts have their say

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 15:59:50 GMT

A worryingly high percentage of high risk websites and apps host malware

It has been a year of ‘will we, won’t we’ with a nervous waiting game on whether we leave the EU. This has had a knock on effect on business confidence and trading, including ad trading in the digital advertising industry has been affected. We have seen a year of relative stagnation in terms of ad spend as marketers have held back budgets in light of a nervous economy. The good news has been that innovation has not remained static. We have seen strong product launches, new start ups bringing fresh ideas to the market and we have finally seen the industry unite together on one common goal: to put the consumer at the heart of the conversation. It is now time to look forward to next year and to hear from leading experts from all sides of the industry to give their thoughts on what to expect from 2020:

Predictions 2020: Transparency

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 15:46:50 GMT

Stop advertising on unsafe domains

As the decade draws to a close, ExchangeWire has invited thought leaders from across the industry to share their predictions and insight into what 2020 will hold for the ad tech and martech industries. Under the spotlight today is transparency, with exploration of how supply-side optimisation, anti-fraud measures, and audience acceptance of ads, are all set to evolve over the coming year.

White Bullet provide tools to combat ad funded piracy

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 14:50:30 GMT

We gather and provide access to the world's most accurate and up to date digital advertising risk data.

White Bullet

Our founders are experienced intellectual property lawyers with long tenure in the media and advertising industries. We are IP experts and no other company or system has such a laser focus on IP risk protection.
Our dedicated technical engineers specialise in AI, big data models and predictive machine learning.
Our highly skilled investigators and data analysts are experienced in tackling the trafficking and distribution of pirated and counterfeit goods.
Our team operates out of London, New York and Los Angeles.

What we do

We gather and provide access to the world's most accurate and up to date digital advertising risk data.
We are currently the only company that offers real-time intelligence that is used by intellectual property rights holders, advertising networks, brands, brand agencies, governments and advisory bodies.
We provide insights, advice and support to make sure brands don’t advertise on high risk websites and applications that host and stream illegal content.
We attribute advertising impression data to high risk websites and applications to give brands an understanding of how much money they spend on funding cybercriminals.
We help IP rights holders to take action against suppliers of stolen content as well as aiding regulatory organisations and governmental bodies to demonetise cybercrime.

How we do it

Independent web crawling.
Our always-learning engine identifies, analyses and scores websites and applications, categorising them as low, medium or high risk and tracks the advertising on them.
Digital advertising expertise.
IP legal expertise.

Why we do it

To protect brand reputation by making sure their ads do not appear on high risk websites and applications.
To help brands stay compliant under industry and governmental regulation and avoid penalties such as helping the regulated gambling sector.
To make sure IP rights owners have a powerful toolbox to combat IP theft.
To demonetise piracy, cybercrime and to curtail the spread of malware that is nearly always embedded in high risk websites and applications.

Who do we do it for?

IP rights holders.
Advertising networks.
Brands and brand agencies.
Governments and advisory bodies. Read EU case study .

How we work with the European Union

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 11:41:32 GMT

90% of IP infringing services rely on some form of ad revenue to exist, with some individual operators making millions of dollars in ad revenue annually.

Our Client

The European Commission is the independent executive branch of the European Union. White Bullet works with the European Commission’s DG Grow department which, amongst other responsibilities, is tasked with generating policy on the protection and enforcement of IPRs in the European Union.

The Challenge

To monitor the effectiveness of the 2018 MoU on online advertising and intellectual property rights IPRs facilitated by the European Commission as part of their “follow the money” IPR enforcement policy.

The MoU is a voluntary agreement between stakeholders in the advertising and creative industries to minimise the placement of digital advertising on IP infringing websites.

To measure the effectiveness of the MoU, smart and scalable technology is required to identify the top IP infringing websites in the European market and provide dynamic and sophisticated data on their advertising profiles.

The Challenge Continued

Digital IP infringement causes the creative industries to lose billions of dollars in revenue and provides the operators of IP infringing services with a market where they can prosper through digital advertising revenue.

Traditional IPR enforcement solutions, such as targeting individual IP infringing services or consumers, are too narrow and slow to address this commercial profiteering through digital advertising.

This has led many organisations – such as the European Commission – to adopt the “follow the money” approach to IPR enforcement through initiatives such as the 2018 MoU. This approach focusses on demonetising digital IP infringement by cutting off the primary source of income – advertising revenue.

90% of IP infringing services rely on some form of ad revenue to exist, with some individual operators making millions of dollars in ad revenue annually.

To monitor the effectiveness of the MoU, next-generation technology is required to identify the vast and ever-changing pool of IP infringing services available and to detect the types of ads funding these services to identify key trends in the advertising landscape.

The Solution

White Bullet's proprietary solution identifies, scores and monitors IP infringing services and the advertising supporting them.

Our IPI Index is a vast global database of actionable intelligence including millions of URLs visited and tracked daily. By staying on top of the fast-evolving landscape, accounting for redirects, domain hopping and mirroring our technology addresses the dynamism of digital IP infringement.

White Bullet’s intelligent and scalable ad harvesting software classifies ads with a brand name, industry sector and ad type. Data is accessible through our analytics tool or via our API, providing clients with the ability to identify key trends overtime, pull landscape reports and better inform policy.

White Bullet also provides expert and professional advice and guidance in tandem with advertising data, enabling clients to better understand the position of ad-funded digital IP infringement and what it means for future policy and industry-level best practices.

White Bullet tackles illegal sports streaming

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 11:41:00 GMT

Sports streaming makes up a huge proportion of online piracy and attracts household name advertising campaigns.

It is estimated that the Deontay Wilder VS Tyson Fury heavyweight boxing match held on the 1st of December 2018 attracted 325,000 pay per views, whereas illegally streamed versions of the fight pulled in around 1.9 million U.S. viewers.

According to Alexa and supporting metrics, many IP infringing sports streaming websites are more prevalent in terms of traffic than their official brand counterparts including The Premier League ( www.premierleague.com ), NBC Sports ( www.nbcsports.com ) and Major League Baseball ( www.mlb.com) .

That’s a lot of people watching for free as compared to paying customers.

Apart from lost revenue to companies that produce and distribute paid streaming content and the inherent damage to the sporting industry, the individuals and organisations that hijack IP infringing streams are making vast sums of money via the mechanics of digital advertising and the placement of premium brand ads.

Digital advertising works on a simple premise, in the same way, that traditional advertising does. More traffic provides more ad impressions and more click-throughs. More Money.

Follow the money

The EU Commission's "follow the money" approach has been well documented ( https://bit.ly/2RWghF9 ), and with White Bullet’s unique insights, authorities like the Commission have been able to proceed with statistically driven evidence to support them.

For example, the stats regarding advertising on IP Infringing sports streaming destinations are a growing cause for concern:

20% of the most popular pirate sites are engaged in sports streaming.

Branded advertising (including premium household names) makes up 96% of all advertising on illegal sports streaming websites. Compared to 22% on illegal websites displaying other content.

Sports streaming makes up a huge proportion of online piracy and attracts the most premium advertising campaigns.

Coupled with millions of unique monthly page views, these pirates are generating millions in advertising revenue from illegal distribution of popular content.

Paid advertising is funding criminal activity online, and this is a real problem. Brands are supporting IP infringement. Also a real problem.

How does illegal sport streaming work, and how to people know where to find it?

Streaming is easy. The internet has made it easier and continues to make it so. A pay per view ticket or paid subscription is all that is needed to share the stream across multiple websites, domains and applications. Pretty much any destination with an IP address. Now add advertising to that destination, and you are ready to go, providing you don't mind a hefty fine, confiscation of all of your IT materials and perhaps a prison sentence.

The trick is to keep the stream a secret until the moment it is needed; otherwise there's a good chance the site will be shut down before the sporting event kicks off.

Burners and Cloakers

Sounds like something out of a fantasy novel, but it's the best way to describe the sophisticated methods that illegal streaming destination sites are using to avoid detection. White Bullet is witnessing a rise in destinations that pop up for the duration of the streamed event and disappear again afterwards. These are "burners", websites to be disposed of after the event has been and gone and the ad impressions and CTR have been "counted up".

"Cloakers" are really something. They appear to the world as an innocuous lifestyle blog or similar with the relevant advertising already in situ. For the most part, these destinations don't get much traffic and nothing much really happens with them until it's time to host a streamed event illegally. Then the feed appears in a content block for the duration before leaving again once the event is over. The site and the advertising stays where it is, and no-one would suspect anything. There would be a massive spike in direct and referral traffic, however, and a whole lot of ad impressions.

Money has been made. Brands have supported IP infringing streams.

How do people find these destinations and view illegally streamed sports media?

The answer is logical and straightforward; social networks and forums and are the primary providers. Links are shared around open social networks like Reddit and closed social networks like Discord. Quality premium shared content is the lifeblood of the social web, and it's near impossible to stop links being shared.

White Bullet's solution

DETECT

White Bullet actively detects websites, applications, communities and systems that stream premium content illegally.

These online destinations are continually monitored for infringement and assigned a risk score. This score is flexible, updating its status as the destination becomes more or less of a risk, "de-cloaks" or vanishes altogether.

White Bullet also detects the advertising displayed on pirate destinations.

The advertising data provides a unique profile into how these destinations make money and who is funding them.
DEMONETISE

Dynamic risk scores are applied to online risk destinations (websites, applications etc.) forming the basis of an always relevant toolset. This intelligence allows brands, agencies and other organisations to take preventative measures in real time and to avoid advertising on high-risk online destinations - saving brands money and protecting their integrity.

The internet moves faster than the time it takes to create and curate static lists, so the only way to stay on top of the issue is to have a solution that compiles data and reports in real-time.

In addition to destinations to avoid and proof of illegal activity, White Bullet supplies information regarding advertising on those sites and who placed it there. This provides transparency for our clients to take action within their digital supply chain.

White Bullet Solutions are pioneers and tech leaders in this space working with an ever-growing roster of clients and IP rights owners that advocate our expertise, data insights to minimise risk and protect intellectual property.

White Bullet works with policymakers and authorities including the EU Commission, UK IPO (Intellectual Property Office) and PIPCU (The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit) to enhance strategies and coordinate with stakeholders.

Q4 2018 Report: 10% of All Ads on Popular IP Infringing Websites in Europe are From Major Brands

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 16:07:00 GMT

Major brands continue to appear on IP infringing websites in significant volumes

White Bullet’s quarterly report tracks advertising data from the top 5000+ IP infringing websites from North America, South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

White Bullet’s Q4 2018 report shows brands continue to play a major role in funding digital IP infringement through ad misplacement. White Bullet found that 40% of all ads on IP infringing websites in Q4 2018 were from branded campaigns, with 10% of all ads coming from major brands.
Project Brand Integrity – a joint initiative between White Bullet and TAG launched in February 2019 – looks to address the levels of major branded advertising appearing on IP infringing websites in Europe by advising advertisers about their presence on high risk pirate websites. Raising awareness by alerting brands at risk is important in the European market as major brands are appearing on high risk websites in significant volume, making up 10% of all ads found. Europe is second only to South America (13% of all ads) in prevalence of major branded ads.
Sponsored content boxes also continue to represent a considerable proportion of the advertising found, making up 30% of all ads in Q4. Sponsored content boxes are advertising campaigns consisting of native advertising placed within content boxes and include multiple advertorials in a single inventory slot. The stakeholders within the digital advertising industry need to raise awareness of the extent to which these native networks increasingly fund digital IP infringement.
Adult and Fraud & Malware campaigns – known as high risk campaigns - are at comparable levels to Q3 2018, comprising 25% of all ads. Interestingly this figure is down from 43% in Q1 2017 , demonstrating that IP infringing operators have been able to shift from lower-paying high risk ad campaigns to more branded and sponsored content campaigns, which often pay more.
This pivot to higher paying advertising is quite likely due to an increase in use of blocklist evasion techniques . These dynamic techniques, such as domain hopping and mirroring, enable IP infringing operators to receive higher paying advertising by moving their operations from domains on static blocklists to clean domains that are not known to the ad industry.
info@white-bullet.com

The Trustworthy Accountability Group launches 'Project Brand Integrity' in partnership with White Bullet.

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 16:55:00 GMT

The Trustworthy Accountability Group launches 'Project Brand Integrity' in partnership with White Bullet.

Project Brand Integrity has been designed primarily to protect European brands from association with illegal stolen content by alerting advertisers or their agencies to ads running on pirate sites in Europe.

Project Brand Integrity has been designed primarily to protect European brands from association with illegal stolen content by alerting advertisers or their agencies to ads running on pirate sites in Europe.

Ads appearing on these websites are harmful to brands in two distinct ways:

They waste companies' digital advertising spend.
They compromise the integrity of the brand, and by extension the integrity of the agency that placed the adverts on their behalf.

Both of these parties will benefit from Project Brand Integrity.

Recognised experts in online IP risk protection, White Bullet Solutions Limited is in a unique position to partner in this important initiative with TAG in Europe.

White Bullet actively collaborates with the European Commission and is also a signatory of the European Commission's 'Memorandum of Understanding on online advertising and IPR'. ( https://bit.ly/2RWghF9 )

The data supplied to Project Brand Integrity originates from White Bullet's IPI Index™ : a growing, dynamic database of IP infringing websites and advertising. White Bullet's proprietary technology continuously learns about the techniques practised by those that run and monetise IP infringing sites.

It's essential that the data comes from a dynamic source because the technology and strategies that drive IP infringing sites are continually evolving. Sites spin up and spin down rapidly, and no static list of sites is going to deal with the real-time nature of digital advertising. As soon as a list has been used to update a database, the data is already old.

“Piracy is now a highly dynamic ecosystem, relying heavily on advertising revenue and continuing to damage the creative industries. We are delighted to be working with TAG on this new programme. It is an essential tool to raise awareness amongst brands and ad agencies so they can take steps to reduce the placement of advertising on IP infringing websites, so tackling the revenue of piracy and
protecting the brands” said Peter Szyszko CEO of White Bullet.

To read more about the specifics of Project Brand Integrity, head over here. https://bit.ly/2SrSNgf

If you are a brand guardian, owner or agency, you are welcome to talk to White Bullet about your brand's safety online anytime. [ info@white-bullet.com ]

#detectanddemonetise

How social media is being exploited to distribute illegal content

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 17:13:00 GMT

“Cloaking”, as outlined in our previous article, is a technique increasingly used by pirates to drive higher quality advertising to their services by deceiving traditional ad industry brand safety tools. But let’s examine how pirates are driving traffic to cloaking sites and what solutions are needed to address the problem.

Cloaking is a technique by which pirates create or otherwise manipulate a website with an innocent-sounding domain name and non-infringing content to facilitate unauthorised live streams of copyrighted content.Pirates will temporarily inject certain webpages on cloaking websites with unauthorised live streams, which can only be accessed via a direct link and will return to being non-infringing once the live stream has finished. This deceives traditional ad industry brand safety tools, enabling pirates to drive higher quality advertising to their services, which often pays more per impression.However, the temporary and direct-linking nature of cloaking websites creates a key problem for the operators of cloaking websites: how do you drive users to these infringing links that will only be active for a couple of hours?The answer: social media.The operators of cloaking websites are exploiting the vast usership of social media to drive traffic to temporarily infringing webpages on cloaking websites, and it just one way in which the social media piracy ecosystem is growing.Facebook removed nearly 3 million posts that hosted or linked to pirated content in the first half of 2018 – a 20% increase from the first half of 2017.Specifically for the sports industry, over 10,000 links to illegal live streams of last summer’s World Cup were found on the three most popular social media networks, accounting for a viewership of over 40 million – an increase of 100% compared to the 2014 World Cup.Groups and forums dedicated to distributing links to pirated content frequently number more than 500,000+ members or subscribers, with rightsholders often critical of the response time of social media networks to their take-down requests.The entertainment industry is most affected by cloaking websites popularised through social media, as cloaking is oriented towards time-sensitive live streams such as sports, fashion, TV content. The damage done to the entertainment industry is alarming. Digital TV research estimate over $52 billion in revenue will be lost to the TV and film industry alone by 2022, with social media platforms playing a significant role in the growth of digital piracy.Social media platforms are unlikely to know which webpages pose IP infringement risk in the short window that these links are active.Only real-time scoring technology can accurately identify which webpages infringe IP in the time schedules required to combat cloaking ,White Bullet’s IPI Index™ continually scores webpages for IP infringement risk in real time, giving social media companies instant and dynamic ability to assess which links on their networks lead to IP infringing content. For more information on cloaking, advertising safety and IP infringement please contact info@white-bullet.com or visit www.white-bullet.com .

AppNexus integrates White Bullet’s IPI Index™ to reduce ad placement on IP infringing services

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 14:12:00 GMT

White Bullet and AppNexus Collaborate to Filter out High Risk IP Infringing Publishers

White Bullet is delighted to announce this ground-breaking collaboration with AppNexus as a major step forward in preventing ad funding of IP infringing websites and apps.Xandr owned AppNexus is the first digital ad exchange to fully integrate the IPI Index™ into its platform. This marks an innovative and pioneering step from a leading programmatic ad exchange to remove notorious IP infringing websites and apps from the digital ad ecosystem.Through this new initiative, AppNexus will protect the reputation of advertisers and demonetise infringing services by calling on White Bullet’s IPI Index™ to filter out high-risk services on a continuous basis. The programme will keep up with the dynamic nature of IP infringing services, by removing high risk redirects and masked domains as well as static domains.White Bullet’s IPI Index™ is a vast and dynamic global database of websites and apps each continually scored for digital IP infringement risk. It gathers data about domains and apps, assesses IP infringements and uses predictive machine learning to dynamically score each domain or application in real-time, making it the preferred tool that can cope with the evolving digital piracy ecosystem.“ By filtering out IP infringing services from the dynamic programmatic ecosystem, AppNexus is taking a serious and effective step to eliminate ad-funded IP infringement and properly protect brands ” said Peter Szyszko, CEO of White Bullet. “ This shows real innovation from both AppNexus and White Bullet to use technology to help advertisers and IP owners alike ”.The partnership between AppNexus and White Bullet will now go further to develop pre-bid filtering in the AppNexus data marketplace, scoring individual URLs in real-time.For more information contact info@white-bullet.com.

The rise of cloaking: how pirates circumvent traditional brand safety tools and drive advertising revenue

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 09:43:00 GMT

How pirates are using cloaking to deceive traditional brand safety tools

“Cloaking” is an increasingly prevalent technique used by pirate websites to avoid being flagged as high risk.

Traditional brand safety tools, used by the ad industry to check if a website is safe for ad placement, cannot keep up with the dynamism of this phenomenon, highlighting the importance of scoring publisher websites for IP infringement risk in real-time.

White Bullet’s real-time scoring system for IP infringement is using advanced technology to address this problem.

Cloaking is a technique by which pirates set up or interact with a website with an innocent-sounding domain name and non-IP infringing content.

However, just before a popular sporting (or other live stream) event begins, an unauthorised stream is injected into the previously non-infringing URL, either by the website itself or through manipulation of the website by external pirates.

Links to the infringing content are then posted in social media networks minutes before the stream goes live.After the live event ends, the unauthorised streams are removed, and the webpage reverts to the original “brand safe” content. This circumvents traditional “lazy” keyword-based flagging for IP infringing websites, avoids any form of “static” blocklist, and frustrates weak techniques that classify only on website type, demography or overall content.

In essence, only specific webpages temporarily become IP infringing during certain specific times of the week.This means advertising flows and funds the website both when it has non-infringing content presented, and during the distribution of illegal or unauthorised content.

A prime example of a website manipulated by cloaking is healthfirstnews.com , which appears to be safe from IP infringement for much of the time and has no IP infringing streams or indeed any streaming content.

However, White Bullet’s dynamic scoring technique analysed that website during play time for recent Premier League football matches and found healthfirstnews.com hosted many illegal streams of those matches as they were being played live. In all cases, premium advertising was being placed against, and therefore funding, those infringing streams.White Bullet found healthfirstnews.com is one of the hundreds of cloaking websites used by pirates to enable and monetise illegal live streaming.

Cloaking should not be confused with URL masking, where the URL appears to be brand safe in name but consistently displays unsafe content on the webpage. Cloaking will see the IP infringing URL return to non-infringing content once the live stream has ended.

The practice of cloaking is deceiving traditional ad industry brand safety tools into evaluating IP infringing websites as non-infringing, and therefore brand safe, in two key ways. Firstly, as cloaking websites only infringe intellectual property for a few hours each week and at irregular intervals, many traditional brand safety tools currently deployed by the digital advertising industry evaluate these websites statically as non-infringing. Secondly, the use of cloaking websites is highly dynamic, with pirates deploying multiple and ever-changing cloaking domains to hide their illegal activity.

Without dynamic next-generation brand safety tools that score websites for IP infringement risk in real-time, cloaking websites will continue to be saturated with advertising, putting brands at risk. Brands and ad companies alike need to be aware of these techniques and adopt the technology needed to address it.

For more information on cloaking, advertising safety and IP infringement please contact

info@white-bullet.com or visit www.white-bullet.com .

White Bullet Engaging With Chinese and Other Asian Authorities To Prevent Ad Funded IP Infringement

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 08:59:00 GMT

Speaking at the 2018 China-EU Conference on IPR Protection Online and Innovation , White Bullet CEO Peter Szyszko laid out the scope and scale of ad funded digital IP infringement and potential risks posed to the Chinese digital ad market.The conference – which was held in Xiamen, China - was jointly organised by EU IPKey and CAASA (China Anti-Infringement & Anti-Counterfeit Innovation Strategic Alliance) to promote collaboration between China and the European Union on IP rights protection online.Collaboration between European and Chinese rightsholders is fundamental to the global knowledge economy. With efforts underway for IP rightsowners and advertising industries to fight IP infringement in Europe and the US, China - and more broadly Asia - is looking to develop similar initiatives.Global cooperation is needed to defund digital piracy. White Bullet is working the European Commission and welcomes this joint initiative from two of the world’s largest markets, and will continue to collaborate and engage with Follow the Money i nitiatives worldwide to help ensure misplaced ad revenue is not funding illegal operators.

White Bullet Q3 2018 Report: Why Are Ad Companies with IP Compliance Commitments Still Funding Digital Piracy and Counterfeiting?

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 16:39:00 GMT

Ad Companies are Not Fulfilling their IP Compliance Commitments.

White Bullet’s Q3 2018 data found that 31% of the ad companies involved in ad placement to pirate and counterfeit websites have taken the TAG Antipiracy Pledge or are signatories to EU MOU on Advertising and IPRs (EUMOU).These companies have committed to minimise misplaced advertising on websites that infringe intellectual property. This is a five percent increase since Q2 2018.Most of these ad companies operate within the programmatic ecosystem and have adopted self-regulatory measures or non-piracy specific brand safety solutions to ensure they are not inadvertently funding illegal pirate and counterfeit websites.White Bullet’s Q3 data clearly shows that without IP focussed tools that can assess IP infringement risk in real time and at scale, the programmatic ecosystem will continue to provide illegal operators with ad revenue.That ad revenue is coming from significant campaigns (branded ad campaigns represented 76% of all campaigns in Q3). Contact White Bullet today to ensure you are IP compliant.

Why Should You Care if Your Brand is Advertising on an IP Infringing Website?

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 14:45:00 GMT

Having your ads appear on IP infringing websites causes damage to your brand’s reputation, funds criminal operators and puts users at risk.

After it was revealed last year that many reputable brands had their advertising appear next to high risk content – including IP infringing websites - many reputable brands re-evaluated their advertising operation s in a reactive effort to minimise the damage caused.But why should brands care if their ads are appearing on IP infringing websites? What real damage does ad misplacement cause to brands? Appearing next to infringing content damages the reputation of brands Brand equity is an intangible asset. The profitability of your brand is directly linked to how your customers regard it.Having your branded advertising appear on IP infringing websites can cause considerable damage to your brand’s reputation as consumers will question the principles underlying your company’s marketing strategy when they see the brand funding criminal activity.Ad revenue funds illegal operators and causes economic damage to the creative IndustriesIP infringing websites rely on ad revenue to function. Without it, most would be unable to operate.But ad revenue does not just keep IP infringing websites afloat, it makes pirate websites a highly lucrative proposition for criminals. Ad revenue linked to digital infringing content was estimated to be over $110m in 2017. The ability of pirate websites to offer free content causes immense economic damage to the creative industries by diverting users away from legitimate licensed media channels. Piracy is set to cost the global TV and film industry upwards of $52 billion dollars in 2022.
Reputable branded advertising lends pirate websites credibility, putting users at risk Having advertising from reputable brands appear on IP infringing websites gives them credibility in the eyes of consumers. It begs the question: if the website is illegitimate, why would such a well-known brand be advertising there?This false legitimacy encourages further engagement with the website, exposing the user to a risk of malware infection. Not only do many files containing the infringing content contain viruses and malware, the digital advertising ecosystem is also littered with malvertising – a form of advertising that can infect users with malware, often without their knowledge.White Bullet’s IPI Brand Monitoring solutions can protect your brand equity and ensure you are not inadvertently funding criminal activityWhite Bullet’s IPI Index™ uses machine learning to identify and score millions of pirate URLs in real time. Websites scored as high risk are monitored for advertising from multiple territories to get national advertising data.White Bullet’s IPI Brand Monitoring solutions alert you if we find your advertising is being misplaced on IP infringing websites. The IPI Index™ identifies the ad companies responsible for misplacing your advertising, giving you the transparency required to take action to ensure your brand’s reputation is safe.Contact us today to find out how White Bullet can protect your brand equity and ensure you are not inadvertently funding IP infringing websites.

What is a High Risk IP Infringing Website?

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 14:40:00 GMT

Many brands and ad companies do not fully understand what an IP infringing website is and lack the tools to correctly assess websites for IP infringement risk.

Intellectual property (IP) infringing websites distribute unauthorised and sometimes illegally copied digital content. Colloquially known as pirate websites, they allow users to download or stream a variety of digital content through illegitimate distributors, often for free by relying on advertising revenue.

Any type of digital content that can be found through legitimate licensed means can also be found on IP infringing websites. Pirate websites can broadly be categorised into three different types: hosting, linking, and BitTorrent websites.

Types of IP infringing websites

Hosting websites act as storage servers that permit users to upload and store media files in the cloud. Once a media file is uploaded, a user can generate a link to access that file again, either themselves or for others to use the link to obtain the content.

Linking websites aggregate links to media content that is stored on hosting websites. They often categorise links by content type and then offer search facilities and suggestions, so users can quickly find content.BitTorrent websites enable specific peer-to-peer (also known as P2P) file transfers over the Internet.

Unlike hosting websites where one user uploads content to the cloud for others to download, P2P file transfers allow users to upload and download content simultaneously, sharing pieces of file data back and forth with each other until everyone has completed downloading the files they want.

Smart technology is needed to assess websites for IP infringement risk

The volume of IP infringing websites and complexity of the digital advertising ecosystem presents a risk to brands and advertisers: how can you be sure that your advertising or traffic is not being served to pirate websites without assessing each publisher for IP infringement risk?

T housands of new pirate domains appear every day as new platforms emerge and others hop domain names to avoid detection from law enforcement and rights-holders. Without the use of smart technology, it is impossible to keep up with the dynamism of the digital piracy ecosystem and score all potentially infringing websites for IP infringement risk.

White Bullet’s IPI Index™ gives brands and ad companies complete protection from IP infringing websites

White Bullet’s IPI Index™ uses machine learning to score millions of URLs for IP infringement risk daily.The IPI Index™ looks at over 400 dynamic data points on each website, enabling White Bullet’s proprietary algorithm - developed by IP and ad industry experts - to score every website for IP infringement risk to a global standard.

The intelligence gathered by the IPI Index™ can be used by brands and advertising companies in several ways to ensure complete digital ad protection against IP infringing websites.

White Bullet’s IPI Risk Profiling solutions give advertising companies the ability to verify domains for IP infringement risk before ad bidding. The IPI Watchlist solution enables advertising companies to create their own dynamic watchlists of high risk domains, and the IPI Scoring solution in addition allows ad companies to assess their own inventories for IP infringement risk.

Any website that is scored as high risk by the IPI Index™ is monitored for advertising. White Bullet’s IPI Brand Monitoring solutions alert brands if their advertising is found on high risk IP infringing domains.

The IPI Index™ captures screenshots of the webpage and harvests intermediary data that can pinpoint the advertising companies responsible for misplacing the ad, providing the transparency needed to take action and ensure the safety of each brand’s reputation.

White Bullet’s IPI Brand Alert provides basic protection, tracking one brand and issuing monthly data reports. White Bullet’s IPI Brand Protect provides deeper brand protection, tracking up to 10 brands and issue weekly data reports. Monthly impact reports are also issued which track progress over time and compares your data to anonymised competitors.

Contact White Bullet today to make use of our market leading intelligence.

Is Your Brand Funding IP Infringing Domains?

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Without integrating White Bullet’s ad safety solutions into your digital marketing operations, part of your advertising budget could be ending up in the hands of pirates.

Ad revenue received by websites infringing intellectual property exceeds hundreds of millions of dollars per year .
A significant portion of this revenue comes from the ad budgets of reputable brands. White Bullet found that 70 of the top 100 global advertisers had an advertising presence on IP infringing websites in 2017.The reason why so many reputable brands are appearing on IP infringing websites is not rooted in an unwillingness to tackle the issue. Rather, it is rooted in three causes: the complex and non-transparent nature of digital advertising, the ability of IP infringing websites to avoid detection, and a lack of dynamic ad safety tools available to brands.The millions of digital advertising transactions that happen every day make the ecosystem extremely complex and non-transparent. With so many advertising companies involved in the supply chain for each impression, it is incredibly difficult to figure out who is responsible for placing ads on high risk publishers.This complexity and inability to trace or fully understand the supply chains of ads means reputable brands have often served millions of impressions to IP infringing websites before they are even aware of the issue or how to fix it. By that time brand reputational damage has already occurred and the pirates have their money.Combine this complexity with the dynamic ability of pirate domains to circumvent law enforcement efforts to demonetize them and it is easy to see why so many reputable brands have an advertising presence on IP infringing websites.When a website becomes notorious for IP infringement, ad industry bodies, rights holders, and law enforcement officials will often lead efforts to blocklist them in an attempt to cut off their ad revenue.To avoid this, pirate websites engage in many blocklist evasion techniques, such as domain hopping.Once an IP infringing website gains a wide enough audience and becomes well known to rights holders and law enforcement agencies, the website will hop to a new, clean domain name that is certain to not be included on any static blocklists.Ad safety tools – such as static blocklists – lack the dynamism and intelligence to keep up with evasion techniques used by IP infringing domains. This lack of dynamism results in premium branded advertising placed by renowned ad exchanges being served to IP infringing domains.White Bullet’s IPI Risk Profiling solutions – powered by White Bullet’s IPI Index™ - tackle the dynamism of the pirate domain ecosystem, giving brands and advertising companies the ability to verify domains for IP infringement risk before bidding.White Bullet’s IPI Index™ is an ever-expanding repository of websites, each assessed and scored for IP infringement risk daily. The IPI Index™ identifies websites involved in domain hopping and other evasion techniques through machine learning, meaning it can prevent your ad budget finding its way into the hand of pirates no matter how sophisticated they are in avoiding detection.White Bullet’s IPI Brand Monitoring solutions can also pinpoint the non-compliant advertising partners responsible for misplacing your branded advertising.Websites that have been certified as IP infringing by the IPI Index™ are tracked for advertising, alerting you if we find your branded advertising on high risk IP infringing websites. White Bullet provides you with screenshots and all the pertinent information about the advertising companies involved in the misplacement of the ad. This gives you the transparency to act against the advertising companies responsible for putting your brand’s reputation at risk.Contact us today to find out how you can integrate White Bullet IPI Risk Profiling and Brand Monitoring solutions into your digital marketing operations.

Proactive, Not Reactive: Brands and Ad Companies Must Adopt Dynamic Pre-bid Safety Tools to Protect Their Brand Equity

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

White Bullet's IPI Index scores millions of URLs for IP infringement risk on an hourly basis, giving advertisers a proactive ad safety solution that offers 360° protection.

“Too many companies are addressing their brand safety issues in a decentralized, piecemeal, and reactive manner”, according to the Brand Safety Institute's co-founder Neal Thurman. In the context of ad misplacement on pirate websites, Thurman is right. Addressing the issue of ad misplacement in a reactionary manner is not a sufficient solution to the two fundamental issues at hand: brand equity damage and the inadvertent funding of illegal websites.The complex and non-transparent nature of programmatic advertising means brands have often inadvertently served millions of impressions to pirate websites before they are even aware of the issue. By that time brand reputational damage may have already occurred and the illegal operators have their money.A reactive solution is needed to fix the damage caused, but to ensure that ad misplacement on pirate websites is avoided in the future, brands and advertising companies must adopt proactive and dynamic tools.Proactive tools – such as infringing website lists and static blacklists – are currently being used by both brands and advertisers. However, these tools cannot compete with the dynamism found within the pirate domain ecosystem.Pirate domains are constantly hopping to new domain names to avoid detection, as well as setting up mirroring domains to dilute their audience base among many different domain names.Blacklists that do not address these evasion techniques used by pirate websites leave advertisers at risk of ad misplacement.This risk is demonstrable. whiteBULLET found that out of the top 100 global companies by ad expenditure, 70 had their branded advertising appear on piracy sites in 2017 . Many of these brands are actively using IWLs and static blacklists, but these lists have failed to protect them from placing ads on pirate websites.whiteBULLET’s IPI Index is the proactive tool that can tackle the dynamism of the pirate domain ecosystem. The IPI Index is the most up-to-date watchlist of high risk pirate websites available on the market. Using machine learning, the IPI Index scores and rescores millions of URLs on an hourly basis for IP risk, whilst also automatically detecting any domains which are engaged in evasion techniques such as domain hopping.The IPI Index can be utilised by brands and advertisers alike. Brands can use the watchlists to inform advertising partners what sites they want to avoid, whilst ad companies can integrate the IPI Index into their platform, giving buyers the option of comprehensive protection from their ads being served to IP infringing websites.The IPI Index is the proactive tool that ensures no reactionary tools are required. Contact whiteBULLET to make use of our IPI Index today. info@white-bullet.com

White Bullet Q2 2018 Report: Branded Ad Campaigns on IP Infringing Websites at Historically High Levels

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Branded Ad Campaigns Accounted for 76% of All Ads Found on IP Infringing Websites.

The percentage of branded advertising on IP infringing websites has increased for the seventh consecutive quarter.

White Bullet’s Q2 2018 report found branded ad campaigns made up 76% of all advertising on IP infringing websites.

This figure stood at 52% in Q4 2016 and has increased every quarter since.

Major branded ad campaigns – advertising from premium household names – also increased in Q2, making up 20% of all branded ad campaigns.

Interestingly, this increase in major branded advertising comes in the same quarter as the signing of the EU Commission’s Memorandum of Understanding on Advertising and IPRs (EU MOU).

Signatories to the EU MOU – many of which are brand associations with members found in WhiteBullet's Q2 ad data – agree to minimise the placement of advertising on websites and mobile apps that infringe third party IP.

Premium brands risk further governmental scrutiny and damages brand reputation unless proactive brand safety tools that can specifically address the dynamism of the piracy domain ecosystem are adopted.

The gambling sector continues to be the largest sector found on IP infringing websites, with 63% of all branded ad campaigns coming from gambling brands. In Q1 2018, this figure stood at 60%.

This increase can be attributed to a rise in gambling campaigns during the World Cup, indicating that gambling operators must ensure they implement IP-specific brand safety tools on all campaigns, even during times of high demand.

White Bullet’s Q2 data also found that 26% of the ad companies serving ads to IP infringing websites are engaged in compliance initiatives such as the TAG Anti-Piracy Group and the EU MOU.

It seems the brand safety tools adopted by major ad companies are not being implemented on all campaigns or these tools lack the dynamism and intelligence to deal with the specific issue of advertising on pirate websites.

Much like premium brands, ad companies must adopt dynamic and IP-specific brand safety tools which can effectively deal with the quickly evolving piracy ecosystem in order to achieve IP compliance.

White Bullet’s IPI Risk Profiling solutions provide real-time intelligence on IP infringing domains, giving ad companies the ability to filter out high risk publishers before bidding.

Contact White Bullet today to ensure you are IP compliant.

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White Bullet Signs EU Commission's MOU on Online Advertising and IPR

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

White Bullet representatives today signed the EU Commission’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on online advertising and intellectual property rights (IPR), along with many advertising stakeholders.

The initiative seeks to minimise ad funded IP infringement by requiring advertisers and brokers to avoid placement of ads on websites and apps that infringe copyright or disseminate counterfeit goods. It recognises that these illegal platforms use the sale of advertising as a significant source of revenue.

Advertising is often the sole source of revenue for these illegal operators, and damage is being caused to consumer confidence and brand equity by inadvertently placing ads on these illicit websites and apps. The loss of tax revenue caused by pirate and counterfeit vendors is also harming governments.

The sheer scale of ad-funded digital IP infringement has led to action by the EU Commission, underlying the importance of IP protection online.

The signatories to the MOU recognise the widespread damage to economic growth that is being caused and are signalling their intent to fix the issue.

White Bullet embraces this agreement and has launched a free Global Piracy Index to help keep brand and advertising agencies compliant with some of the key terms of the MOU.

Globalpiracyindex.com is a freely accessible list of websites that have court orders against them relating to IPR infringement and launches this week. The Global Piracy Index also includes any websites listed in infringing website list (IWL) initiatives from around the world.

Pirate websites are constantly changing domain names and using other tactics to avoid detection and circumvent law enforcement. It is no surprise to learn that the vast majority of pirate websites have no court orders against them.

To truly ensure all steps have been taken to minimise ad misplacement, White BulletIPI Index™ can be integrated into the advertising operations of brands and agencies.

White Bullet's IPI Index™ evaluates all websites and not just those adjudicated by courts or enforcement bodies. It uses real time assessment and machine learning to analyse and score websites for IP infringement risk, evaluating over 400 data points and specialist criteria validated by IP owners, IP lawyers, and law enforcement.

There are currently millions of domains scored in the IPI Index, making the IPI Index™ the global standard for online IP risk assessment.

The IPI Index™ provides full protection against ad misplacement on pirate websites and offers a cost effective solution to protect brands.

Can Ad Exchanges Do More to Combat Pirate Sites?

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Real-time bidding (RTB) through programmatic ad exchanges has revolutionised the digital advertising industry.

Juniper Research estimates RTB networks will generate $42 billion annually in advertising spend in 2021, up from $3.5 billion in 2016. However, the instantaneous nature of programmatic exchanges combined with a lack of natively-integrated tools to dynamically verify publisher quality has led to exchanges brokering branded advertising on high risk publishers that host adult, hate speech, or IP infringing content.

White Bullet's quarterly reports show ad exchanges are consistently found in the intermediary supply chain of ads served to pirate websites, indicating high risk websites are taking advantage of ad exchanges to gain funding.

Fearing the damage to the brand's reputation that may be caused by ad misplacement, many big brands have rethought their programmatic operations. Some brands, such as P&G , have cut their ad spend by hundreds of millions of dollars and limited their digital marketing reach due to brand safety concerns.

Others – nearly two-thirds of all advertisers using programmatic exchanges - have fully or partially moved programmatic buying in-house in an attempt to ensure their branded advertising is never served to high risk publishers.

Bringing programmatic buying in-house indicates the increasing importance advertisers are placing on brand safety, including anti-piracy verification, and widespread recognition of the lack of transparency provided in the digital advertising ecosystem.

With real-time buying comes the need for real-time verification of publishers. If ad exchanges do not have accurate and dynamic risk assessments about the publishers where to which they serve ads, advertisers and brand equity will suffer.

Dynamic risk scoring is imperative when it comes to ensuring brands are not funding criminals. Websites must be regularly reviewed to test and retest the quality of their content and site experience outside of the ad exchange ecosystem.

Further, as many IP infringing websites are constantly changing their domain names to avoid detection , advertisers and ad exchanges cannot simply rely on static block-lists to ensure brand safety.

Smart technology that can accurately and instantly analyse the brand safety risk a publisher poses to an advertiser must be embraced by exchanges and directly integrated into their RTB technologies. At a minimum, ad exchanges should filter the lowest quality sites prior to sending bid requests to the exchange’s demand-side platform participants. Ad exchanges should also support third-party data integrations that enhance bid requests with additional dynamic sites scores for piracy risk.

White Bullet's IPI Index and data service is the real-time solution needed. The IPI Index uses machine learning and dynamic scoring to independently evaluate the brand safety risk a publisher poses to a brand in milliseconds. White Bullet's data-as-service solution can be integrated into existing RTB systems and can also be utilised by brands who are conducting in-house brand safety verification checks.

If ad exchanges can get on top of ad misplacement by directly integrating AI-driven regulatory compliance technology, they will provide the transparency and safety needed to win back the trust of advertisers.

Infringing Website Lists (IWLs): As France looks to follow the lead of others, smart blocklist technology is needed to defeat IWL evasion techniques

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Françoise Nyssen, France’s Minister of Culture, admits any “blacklist” must be "constantly updated" to circumvent blocklist evasion techniques used by IP infringing websites. Due to sheer volume and dynamism of the online and mobile piracy ecosystems, keeping an effective list of infringing websites cannot be done through reliance on human review alone.

Smart use of artificial intelligence, as a trusted flagging mechanism for human review, is the way to manage this.

France appears to be the latest country to adopt an Infringing Website List (IWL) as part of the French government’s strategy to demonetize pirate websites.Although IWLs have proven to be successful in limiting advertising revenue received by pirate websites in the past, the increased use of blocklist evasion techniques – such as domain hopping, automatic redirecting, and mirroring – is challenging the effectiveness of IWLs. Technology can help solve this.

Through “Operation Creative”, PIPCU – the City of London Police’s intellectual property crime unit – was the first to develop an IWL as part of a wider strategy to reduce financial and technical support to pirate websites. This included tackling the advertising revenue received.Initially developed in 2013, the PIPCU IWL comprises a list of websites, known to be unresponsive to law enforcement and each reviewed by police officers. Brands, advertising companies, and other Operation Creative stakeholders can use the IWL to identify illegal websites.

Based on ad monitoring data provided by White Bullet, in the twelve months from March 2016, PIPCU demonstrated a 64% decrease in advertising from the UK’s top ad spending companies on IWL websites.In the wake of Operation Creative’s success since 2016, numerous countries have adopted similar approaches. Governments and law enforcement agencies recognise that the most effective anti-piracy strategy is to engage with brands and advertising companies to ensure they are not inadvertently funding illegal websites through advertising revenue – often their sole source of income. Denmark , Indonesia , Hong Kong , Malaysia , and Taiwan have all implemented IWL initiatives in one form or another. Françoise Nyssen’s comments suggest France could be the next to follow.

White Bullet's Q4 2017 ad-tracking data from France shows 300 premium brands had placed advertising on pirate websites.However, despite the introduction of IWL initiatives being a positive development, and a way to highlight the problem within the advertising community, blocklist evasion techniques used by pirate websites have challenged first-generation static IWL methods.According to White Bullet, next-generation technologies should be implemented to keep infringing lists updated, tracking websites in real time and seriously impacting their ability to receive revenue from misplaced advertising.This is because AI and real-time, or dynamic, tracking can see past domain hopping and similar techniques used by pirate websites.

Such technologies form the basis of version 2.0 IWL blocklisting.Domain hopping is an evasion technique used frequently. When Google receives large numbers of takedown requests for a particular infringing website, Google attempts to demote the website in their search engine results. Moreover, the more takedown requests a website has, the more likely it is to be placed on an IWL.To avoid this, pirate websites often hop to a new domain that has no takedown requests and may automatically redirect users to their new domain.

Mirroring – where two or more websites appear to be identical in everything other than protocol or domain name – is another technique used by pirate websites to stay off law enforcement’s radar. By mirroring its content across multiple domains, the website may dilute its takedown requests.Such blocklist evasion techniques keep pirate websites one step ahead of blocklists like the PIPCU IWL.As of May 8th, 2018, 36% of the domains listed in the PIPCU IWL have hopped, automatically redirect to, or mirror another infringing domain that is not included in the IWL.

Although advertisers and brands know to avoid placing ads on domains in the PIPCU IWL, they will not necessarily be aware if any of those domains have hopped or automatically redirect to a new domain. Nor will they be aware of any websites that mirror domains in the IWL. Domains that have arisen as a result of blocklist evasion techniques should also be considered high risk.White Bullet has published multiple reports in the past showing brands and ad companies that have embraced the IWL are still inadvertently misplacing advertising on websites that infringe third party intellectual property , partly because legacy IWL methodologies still used in the industry fail increasingly to successfully combat new blocklist evasion techniques.Many ad companies, brands as well as governments and enforcement bodies turn to White Bullet to provide AI-driven regulatory compliance technology to address blocklist evasion techniques used by pirate websites.

White Bullet'sIPI Index is a dynamic and ever-expanding platform analysing millions of IP infringing domains, each assessed and scored for IP infringement risk on a daily basis. Effectively, the IPI Index is the next generation IWL. White Bullet's AI-driven technology detects if a domain has hopped or automatically redirects to a new domain, as well as detecting mirroring relationships between infringing domains.To keep their blacklists up to date, keepers of IWLs must invoke dynamic AI-driven technology to stay ahead of circumvention and the anti-detection techniques deployed by pirate websites.To ensure you have the most up to date piracy watchlist on the market – one that eliminates the issue of blocklist evasion techniques – contact White Bullet to make use of our IPI Index.

Top UK Gambling Companies Feel Pressure to Reduce Their Advertising on IP Infringing Websites

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

White Bullet's ad monitoring service, which identifies fraudulent affiliates, drives progress in reducing frequency of ads served on IP infringing websites.

In the wake of pressure from the UK Gambling Commission and use of White Bullet's smart technology, many of the UK’s top gambling companies have drastically reduced their advertising presence on pirate websites.The UK Gambling Commission had been informed by the City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) that gambling companies were some of the worst offenders in terms of inadvertently funding IP infringing (pirate) websites through advertising.PIPCU launched Operation Creative in 2013 to disrupt and reduce funding to IP infringing websites. The initiative developed the Infringing Website List (IWL) – a list of IP infringing websites that brands, ad companies, and other entities could use to better inform their advertising operations.White Bullet worked closely with PIPCU’s Operation Creative , tracking locally served ads on the websites listed in the IWL and regularly identified ads for the top UK gambling companies on IWL websites.The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) implemented License condition 16 in late 2016:“You must ensure that you do not place digital advertisements on websites providing unauthorised access to copyrighted content and must take all reasonable steps to ensure that third parties with whom you contract do similar.”The primary aim behind this licensing condition was to ensure the ad budget for gambling companies was not ending up in the hands of the operators of IP infringing websites. If gambling companies fail to comply with the condition they can expect hefty fines or even the revocation of their license.To comply with this licensing condition, many of the top UK gambling companies have opted to use ad monitoring service s from White Bullet to track when their ads fall on pirate websites and then take action to stop it. Brands using this solution have on average seen a 92% reduction in the volume of their ads served to IP infringing websites over the last two years, with ads moving to safer websites.

White Bullet's ad monitoring service tracks advertising across millions of infringing URLs, categorising each ad found with a brand and a sector . White Bullet also analyses the full ad path and identifies the individual third-party affiliates and ad companies responsible for placing each ad, enabling advertisers to identify who is responsible for the misplacement of their ads.The UKGC’s licensing condition is a strong example of the increased awareness on the importance of brand safety across a range of online activity. Gambling operators, as well as brands from other industries, are beginning to realise the need for safer ad placement.Skybet recently announced it has completely abandoned the use of affiliate advertising due to the risk of non-compliant affiliate advertising. Paddy Power Betfair has taken a similar stance, implementing a one-strike policy for their affiliates and tougher compliance conditions. Outside the gambling industry, companies like Unilever have committed to pull ads from exchanges that use inventory from risky websites. However, many brands are still at risk and would benefit from improved technology to prevent the misplacement of their advertising on illegal and dangerous websites. White Bullet continues to find ads from major brands on IP infringing websites. Research recently conducted by White Bullet found that among the top global ad spenders 70% had their branded advertising appear on pirate sites in 2017. How does this happen in the current environment where brands are increasingly feeling the pressure and showing a genuine willingness to improve their ad placement? The answer can be found in the shortcomings of static blacklists.In the context of keeping advertising off IP infringing websites, the high churn rate of piracy sites means static blacklists, including any of the industry’s infringing website lists kept by legal brand safety providers, that are not maintained hourly, cannot provide comprehensive protection. Pirate websites use domain hopping and redirection to evade enforcement and quickly and regularly go offline as new domains emerge to take their place. Any static list of infringing websites will not provide true insight into this dynamic ecosystem nor the real-time guidance needed to protect brands.White Bullet's IPI Index evaluates existing and new websites for IP infringement risk on an hourly basis. Websites are dynamically scored using artificial intelligence based on a range of criteria to determine infringement risk. This dynamism ensures the IPI Index stays ahead of the high churn rate of pirate websites and is an effective tool in comprehensively identifying publishers that infringe third party intellectual property.

White Bullet Q1 2018 Report: Ad Exchanges Need to Play a Greater Role in Brand Safety

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Ad Exchanges Must Do More to Keep Brands Safe

White Bullet's Q1 2018 report shows a decrease in the number of unique brands advertising on pirate websites. This decrease largely comes from US data. It is likely efforts by ad intermediaries within TAG have assisted in this reduction. TAG is an organisation of brands and ad companies who have pledged to take all reasonable steps to prevent their ads being served to pirate websites.It will be interesting to see if a similar trend happens in Europe once the EU Memorandum of Understanding has come into force.

Interestingly, White Bullet's Q1 data shows there was 43% increase in gambling sector ads. Although gambling brands engaged with White Bullet have drastically reduced their advertising presence on IP infringing websites, new gambling brands have emerged to take their place.This demonstrates that to effectively demonetize pirate websites, ad companies must play a greater role. Whilst brands can effectively reduce inadvertent ad misplacement when given pertinent supply chain information, ad companies and affiliates will simply serve other brands to those vacated inventory slots.Ad exchanges in particular could do much more to address the issue. Ad exchanges appeared in the supply chain of 37% of all ads served to pirate websites in Q1. Smart technology needs to be implemented by exchanges to verify in real-time the risk publishers poses to the reputation of brands. White Bullet is actively looking to integrate its AI-led IPI Index with exchanges as a real-time solution that eliminates brand reputational damage.Only White Bullet has a proven track record in reducing branded advertising presence on pirate websites – contact us now to make use of pre and post-bid ad safety solutions. Contact White Bullet today to ensure you are IP compliant.

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Why Dynamic Risk Scoring is Needed to Tackle the Brand Safety Crisis

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

A recent study by White Bullet found many premium brands appearing on IP infringing websites.

The past year saw increased pressure from advertisers on exchanges to keep their ads off websites that could cause brand reputational damage.An intensified collective effort within the digital advertising industry has aimed to eliminate the presence of premium branded advertising on fake news, hate speech, and digital piracy sites.After being alerted by brands earlier this year that their advertising was appearing next to inappropriate content on YouTube, ad companies responded by increasing the use of third-party brand safety tools to protect their clients.Beyond YouTube, other publishers have been affected by the crisis. Sites such as Ranker have reported they are being blacklisted by certain exchanges due to some content on their site being deemed high risk to advertisers. Ranker is largely a safe site for advertisers in terms of brand reputational risk, although they do have some user-generated content that can seem questionable when analysed solely on a keyword basis.These third-party tools regularly flag content that is not high risk or resides in a grey area, as well as failing to flag publishers that would unquestionably cause brand reputational damage.Premium branded advertising placed by renowned ad exchanges is regularly found on intellectual property infringing websites. Research conducted by White Bullet found that out of the top 100 global companies by ad expenditure , 70 had their branded advertising appear on piracy sites in 2017. Many of these impressions were placed by major ad companies.Third-party brand safety tools often flag content as inappropriate through a blanket approach to high risk keywords, ignoring the wider context of the publishing site. This lack of contextualisation has left legitimate publishers out in the cold whilst letting risky ones slip through the net.Context-driven dynamic risk scoring tools are required to address the issue of brand reputational risk within the industry.Dynamic risk scoring principles are at the foundation of White Bullet's methodology of identifying piracy sites through their IP Infringement Index (IPI Index™). The IPI Index™ uses artificial intelligence to score publishers as to how infringing and high risk they are. The algorithm that generates the score is based on keyword components but also considers the wider context of the publishing site through harvesting other meta-data.A site will not be deemed infringing just because a certain keyword is present, nor will it be considered safe if no designated keywords can be found. The presence of a keyword triggers a score which builds up depending on the context. Only if the context meets the set threshold will the keyword component factor into the overall risk assessment of the site.Static blacklists and strict keyword driven approaches have failed to address the brand safety crisis. Dynamic risk-scoring solutions need to be expanded throughout the digital advertising ecosystem to eliminate the presence of premium branded advertising on high risk websites.

White Bullet Q4 2017 Report: Brands Engaged with White Bullet See Huge Reduction in Misplaced Ads

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Brands Reduce Ad Misplacement with White Bullet

White Bullet’s ad monitoring service, which identifies fraudulent affiliates, drives progress in reducing frequency of ads served on IP infringing websites.Brands using White Bullet’s ad monitoring service have on average seen a 92% reduction in the volume of their ads served to IP infringing websites over the last two years, with ads moving to safer websites.White Bullet’s ad monitoring service tracks advertising across millions of infringing URLs, categorising each ad found with a brand and a sector. White Bullet also analyses the full ad path and identifies the individual third-party affiliates and ad companies responsible for placing each ad, enabling advertisers to identify who is responsible for the misplacement of their ads.However, many brands are still at risk and would benefit from improved technology to prevent the misplacement of their advertising on illegal and dangerous websites. White Bullet continues to find ads from major brands on IP infringing websites. Research recently conducted by White Bullet found that among the top global ad spenders 70% had their branded advertising appear on pirate sites in 2017. Contact White Bullet today to ensure you are IP compliant.

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White Bullet Q3 2017 Report: Premium Brands and Malvertising Continue to Jointly Fund Digital IP Infringement

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Piracy and counterfeit Q3 2017 report: Premium Brands and Malvertising Continue to Jointly Fund IP Infringement

White Bullet estimates piracy sites received over £800,000 in ad revenue from malvertising in Q3 of 2017. These estimates are based on conservative sampling data and known malware risk.The majority of this malvertising took the form of deceptive ads (76%), such as click generators. Adware (12%), potentially unwanted programmes (8%), and browser hijackers (4%) made up the rest of the malware ad-data.Piracy sites have a long history of exposing users to malvertising. As premium brands have ramped up their brand safety efforts to keep their advertising off IP infringing websites, piracy sites have increasingly turned to malvertising in order to generate revenue.However, despite their best efforts, the tools available to legitimate advertisers are not successfully eliminating their presence on IP infringing websites. White Bullet found many instances of premium branded advertising appearing next to malicious adverts on IP infringing websites in Q3.Not only does this damage the reputation of the major brands, it also gives the malvertising an air of legitimacy.In the eyes of the perpetrator, malvertising is one of the most efficient illicit money-making schemes. This coupled with the scale and instantaneous nature of programmatic advertising means it is unlikely that major ad exchanges can put an end to malvertising anytime soon. Contact White Bullet today to ensure you are IP compliant.

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White Bullet Q2 2017 Report: 8% Increase in Branded Advertising Since Q1

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Branded Advertising on Pirate and Counterfeit Sites Increases in Q2

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White Bullet Q1 2017 Report: 30% Increase in Advertising Found on IP Infringing Websites Since Q4 2016

damien.bidmead@gmail.com (Damien Bidmead) — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Major Brands Increasingly Found on IP Infringing Websites

Contact White Bullet today to ensure you are IP compliant.

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