Placing Adsense in Forum with links to Torrent sites

[wands]

Hi everyone, Im new here. Just would like to ask a question regarding adsense.

Would it be possible to place adsense ads on forums where there are users who post links to torrent sites?

I email to google about this, but have not gotten a reply for a couple of days.

Thank you

[joelgreen]

I would not do that. Torrent links are often linking to copyrighted material, and your adsense account can be closed because of this.

[MyNewPC]

AdSense rules are based on the content of the site where the AdSense ads appear, not the content of a linked site.

joelgreen, you are suggesting that a site with AdSense ads can't link to cnn.com since cnn.com's content is copyrighted.

[AussieWebmaster]

No you can't put AdSense on a site that is promoting stealing copyrighted material

[AussieWebmaster]

promoting cnn is one thing... but you break T&Cs if you say start a site called DNN and just iframe in or download CNN stuff and pass it off as your own

[greatstart]

The Google search engine page results have links to torrents sites, and they have ads on them.

I think it's okay to have links to the sites, but NEVER have links directly to the actual files for downloading.

[joelgreen]

joelgreen, you are suggesting that a site with AdSense ads can't link to cnn.com since cnn.com's content is copyrighted.

Sorry, it should have been "Torrent links are often linking to stolen copyrighted material".

Banned from adsense because of torrent link:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[wands]

Thanks for all the reply everyone.
And thanks to joelgreen for the informative link.

[vincevincevince]

You really need to differentiate between different types of torrent link. Many people use torrents to distribute things which they have fully rights to distrubute but may not be able to afford the conventional bandwidth to do so. Many linux distributions, for example, are released as torrents in addition to conventional formats as that can mean much faster downloads due to the inevitable bottlenecks at the FTP server in the weeks after the new release.

In the case of these legal torrents then I cannot see why Google could object in any way to you giving links to the sites which list them or even to the files themselves.

It's like saying "You can't put Adsense on a site which links to MP3 files" - something which would cause serious problems for the many sites based entirely around distributing MP3s of unsigned or even hobby artists for whom it is one of their more major forms of promotion.