Adsense and MP3 Music Website :: Doubts Cleared
Google Adsense is a program for both publishers and advertisers to find each other and diplay relavent ads on the publishers’ site. The advertisers pay google a small sum everytime someone clicks an ad on the publishers site and google then pays a small commission to the publishers in return for their service. Everything is hunky dory.
Now lets get to the part YOU’RE interested in….the Publishers. Anyone can be a publisher. All you need is a website with some meaningful content on it and you can start displaying ads and earning money. But there’s a small catch. Not EVERYONE can just diplay ads, and you can’t just display ads on a site with any type of content. Firstly, your site needs to big enough. Singe page websites don’t do.
Now to the important stuff. You can’t display just any type of content with these advertisements. Google has a specific list of niches which are BANNED from displaying adsense advertisements. Some of these niches are banned for social reasons, like pornography and pedophilia. Other reasons which are very important to us here are copyright infringement and illegal items.
Google is a highly eputed copmany that has in its list of clients almost all the big companies of this world. Hence, it follows that these companies would not want to be associated with sites which infringe copyrights. Also, Google would get sued quite badly if it was discovered that it was showing ads on sites which had content which was stolen.
Hence, google has a very strict copyright infringement policy. They will shut down anything that even remotely smells of plagiarism or copyright infringement. They are really paranoid about not displaying their ads on sites which do not conform to their Terms of Service. MP3’s come under this banned niche. Google does not allow their ads to be hosted on a site which allows MP3 downloads from their site because MP3’s are intellectual property which cannot be publicly distributed without the explicit permission of their owner. Hence, if you host mp3’s and allow them to be downloaded from your site, adsense isn’t for you. They will shut down your account real quick.
Not only is downloading mp3s from an adsense driven site banned, you are not allowed to even give links to external sites allowing download of music as this means you are aiding and abetting stealing of intellectual property. The simply point is, you simply can’t be in any way promoting theft of intellectual property like music, and in our case, MP3’s. No downloads, no links to download them. Even embedding music on your site is a strict no-no as even public broadcast is not allowed without permission from the artist.
Google follows the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and it has a page which explains what it’s policy is on copyright infringement. The link is : Google DMCA.
I hope the above information helps you and makes you wiser on how to run your site. You should be really careful of the above while running a site, specially one of MP3’s. Not only should you not infringe anyone’s copyright, you should also immediately report sites which are hosting illegal material or promoting illegal material to google so they can close down the site in the name of fairness.
