Several digital key players have joined forces with the Danish Ministry of Culture and the Danish Rights Alliance to prevent cash flows to illegal online services.
The internet enables products and services to be distributed, marketed, and experienced in new ways. Unfortunately, the development of online products and business models by legal services is undermined by illegal services.
Online advertising is one of the digital business models that are being misused to fund criminal activity. Since purchasing digital ads largely is an automated process with many actors, ads for legal products can inadvertently end up on illegal sites, thus helping to fund illegal activity.
Therefore, several key digital players, including some of Denmark’s biggest media agencies, payment intermediaries, and industry organizations have joined forces with the Danish Rights Alliance and the Danish Ministry of Culture to sign a Codex, where signatories voluntarily commit to preventing ads, payment, and traffic from legal companies to end up on illegal websites.
A more secure and legal internet
Codex stems from the work of the Ministry of Culture’s Dialogue Forum for restricting illegal content on the internet, which was initiated by the Ministry and the Rights Alliance back in 2013. Dialogue Forum has brought together all relevant actors to enter into the joint Codex agreement and to use the so-called Collaborations List that lists all illegal services that should not be advertised on or sent money and traffic to.
The Collaborations List is a list of information on websites that have been ruled illegal by the Danish Courts, which the Rights Alliance makes available to the Ministry of Culture who then redistributes the list to the signatory actors in the Codex agreement. The actors then block ads, payment, and traffic from ending up on the illegal websites that appear on the list.
The Codex agreement is another positive result of the public authorities’ active commitment to public-private cooperation to ensure a more secure and legal internet, and the Danish Minister of Culture Joy Mogensen greatly appreciates the cooperation:
“It is important that we stand together to ensure that advertisements for legal services and products do not inadvertently end up on illegal websites and in this way indirectly help to finance illegal activities. That is why I am pleased that there is so much support for the Codex agreement from the key digital players.”
The actors’ involvement creates the results
At the Danish Media Association, one of the Codex signatories, Digital Manager, Allan Sørensen, also points out that the Codex agreement reflects a common understanding of the need for cooperation:
“It is positive to see so many actors backing up to prevent illegal activity on the internet. Legislation and court decisions can only solve part of the problem, but in the end, it is the commitment and willingness of the various actors to enforce the rules that creates the results.”
At the same time, however, the Director of the Rights Alliance, Maria Fredenslund, emphasizes that even more must be done to ensure that the internet is a safe place to engage and make purchases:
“The expectation is that Dialogue Forum will form the framework for further initiatives for active public-private cooperation and that even more actors will join forces to fight crime on the internet. The illegal market is constantly changing, and the perpetrators are becoming more and more creative in their way of circumventing the rules. We must be able to keep up with that development to get rid of the problems,” she explains.
Read more about the Codex agreement here.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact the Danish Rights Alliance’s Head of Communications, Ditte Rie Agerskov, + 45 22 73 68 68
