We recently ran a story about American Express advertising on Filestube, the site that infringes my copyrights while suggesting porno links next to my brand.  The American Express ad was served by Google’s DoubleClick ad network presumably at the behest of Ogilvy & Mather.

Yesterday a Google spokesperson told us that they had disabled “self serve” advertising for this site.  We weren’t really sure if that meant no more DoubleClick on FilesTube, or if it was some kind of semantic dodge. We’ve had a bunch of those dodging semantics on this issue.  However we monitored FilesTube yesterday and we see no sign of DoubleClick.   We applaud Google for taking this action!

Now not to look a gift horse in the mouth but we’d  love to see Google disable advertising for all those sites that they know are infringing copyright. The ones they mentioned in this handy press release. See it seems a little disingenuous to lower these sites rankings but at the same time to continue doing advertising business with them?  (And yes we are already monitoring advertising on these sites!!)

American Express is another matter. We have not heard back from American Express.  We’d love to hear what American Express has to say about their company helping to finance copyright infringement–not just mine, but all of the artists. We’d love to know how that happened and if they intend to continue advertising on these sites. Cause it doesn’t seem like a very good idea for an iconic American Brand.

Now  I’ve lost my handy pocket version of the RICO statute. People are always borrowing it!  But I’m almost certain that it says something about making plans to profit from copyright infringement as a RICO “predicate”.  I’m no lawyer but if I were a big company like American Express I wouldn’t want to get anywhere near a website  that even had the potential to get wrapped up in a RICO investigation.  Especially one based in Moldova.

Today FilesTube looks like a wasteland of QuiBid ads, MacKeeper popups and click shoot ads.  Pretty low grade.  Seems like it’s not just American Express which got the memo.

Toyota however did not get the memo!   So now it’s Toyota’s turn to answer the question?  Why  are you  advertising on this site?