Can I duplicate ads? Is this copyright infringement?

My own Adsense PSA alternative

[dataguy]

I've recently started using Adsense on a few of my web sites, and lately I've been seeing a lot of PSA's being displayed instead of Adsense ads.

I have quite a bit of experience in remote-content and link advertising, and I've been toying with the idea of creating my own PSA alternative. Something that displays ads that look exactly like Adsense ads, but is actually running in place of Adsense PSA's.

My question is, if I use the exact same parameters for the replacement ads, am I in danger of some sort of copyright violation?

I'd love to be able to allow my customers to copy and paste their Adsense code into a page on my web site and have it return an exact duplicate that they can use for their PSA page, except that the ads will not come from Google, they will come from my membership database. This would allow my customers to set up PSA ads without having go through the painstaking process of matching up the PSA colors to their Adsense ads. This would require that I use the same script vars and css elements as Adsense. Is that pushing the limits of copyright?

Thanks for your help!

(Just read the Adsense Policies page, I guess this is a bad idea.)

[varya]

Not copyright...trademark infringement. Google owns the "trade dress"...the appearance of the ads.

[yintercept]

Before talking about copying Google, I thought I should bring up the alternative ads. If you want to display ads in lieu of the Google PSAs you just need to define an alternative ad. The alternative ad really is just a web page that has the dimensions of the iframe that google uses. If you want an alternative ad for a 160 by 600 space, you create a page that is 160x600 and displays what ever you want.

Other posts in this forum indicated that Google does not like people duplicating the style of Google Ads for alternative ads. Running alternative ads that look like Google is worse than a copyright violation. As you have a contract with google, you have to abide by their TOS or get booted.

In my alt ads, I just show a couple of banners.

Of course you were talking about setting up a competitor to Google:

Something that displays ads that look exactly like Adsense ads, but is actually running in place of Adsense PSA's.

My question is, if I use the exact same parameters for the replacement ads, am I in danger of some sort of copyright violation?

Of course, you are talking about setting up an entirely different program that google. If you create something that is using the same format, then, yes, you leave yourself open to Google's crying foul.

Your worst problem is that there's not a large number advertisers interested in buying ads until you have page impressions by the millions per day. I suspect many advertisers have been burned by fly by night operations that sell fake clicks.

If I were working on such a project, I would design it fromt the ground up and try to look completely different from Google.

[dataguy]

I've already got a few web sites that offer this type of link exchange (You display the link box x times on your site, your link gets displayed y number of times on other web sites). These sites get a lot of traffic and page displays, but they serve non-targeted ads and their click-thru rates are terrible (average about .5%).

I wasn't really thinking of trying to create a competitor to Google, but with all the talk of the increase in PSA's being displayed now I was thinking about maybe converting one of my sites to appeal to AdSense users. Sure I can create a totally different ad style that looks good but is not an AdSense ad. What I think would be really cool is to have an interface that allows a user to paste AdSense code into it and have it return a color-matched alternative to PSA's. This would greatly simplify the process and is certainly no great technical feat, but this specifically is mentioned in the AdSense policy page as something not allowed.

I'm making pretty good money with AdSense, and I wouldn't want to bite the hand that's feeding me right now...