We got this nice comment today from Francine Hardaway on behalf of Zedo (who we called out in an earlier post).  It’s gratifying to hear that a company in the ad network business cares enough about artists to respond to criticism.  This exchange highlights the most important aspect of the collision of legitimate companies with the seedy underbelly of the Internet–it’s not enough to sit back and wait for someone to formally notify you when things are going wrong.

Ad networks are the Pinto of the 21st Century and it’s important not to cover up responsibility as it will only come back to bite in the end.  Not to mention that good companies are run by good people who want to do the right thing.

I’m particularly glad to get this response because Esther Dyson’s book “Release 2.0” inspired me in the 90s.  We look forward to not seeing Zedo show up on pirate sites we check in the future.

“Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We agree with you on torrent sites. ZEDO has many ad network customers, and while we contractually prohibit them from serving ads on sites that allow torrents or downloads of copyright protected content, we can’t practically police this.  We respond to takedown notices quickly and take them seriously.  We will find out which of our customers this is and get our tags taken off the site.  ZEDO must be significantly far down the daisy chain here, though.  We haven’t been able to find our tags directly on these sites yet but there is obviously a huge chance that the ad network on the site is selling to another ad network, who sells to another one,  and at some point, a ZEDO customer.

Bummer. Obviously neither we nor Esther Dyson condone this.”