p2pnet view P2P | Freedom:- Google is arguably the biggest, best, most successful file sharing indexing site on the net. So why isn’t it on the RIAA hit list? – p2pnet has wondered on a number of occasions, most recently in May last year.

Gargle gets away with it while others don’t.

Interesting.

Then, “Google has now officially lined up alongside the entertainment cartels”, said p2pnet, quoting Google lawyer Kent Walker as stating, “There are more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the web and more than 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute”, but “along with this new wave of creators come some bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright”.

Actually, they don’t. They share with each other, as people have done since the beginning of time. But Hollywood and Big music have re-framed sharing as ‘copyright infringement, we pointed out.

In a later post, we had Mitch Bainwol, spinster-in-chief for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), owned by Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but controlled by a Canadian), declaring >>>

Our first blush take? These are encouraging and positive first steps towards a more sensible online experience for both users and the music community.

Google deserves credit for proposing a constructive set of reforms and undertaking useful steps to better protect the rights of creators and encourage legal ways to enjoy music.

While there is much more work to be done, this announcement is an important acknowledgement that everyone involved in the online ecosystem has a shared responsibility to constructively address the online piracy problem that is devastating the creative industries.

Obviously, the details of implementation will be critical, and we look forward to working with Google on all the steps necessary to effectively combat infringement.

“OK”, we said, “Stay tuned. ”

And now Bainwol’s patience has been rewarded.

“It seems Google is making good on the promise it made last month to ‘better address’ what it calls the ‘bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright’,” writes Jared Moya on Zeropaid, going on >>>

The search engine giant’s four part plan for “Making Copyright Work Better Online” included a pledge to “prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete,” and now it has done just that.

Unfortunately, it chose terms without any sort of feedback by users nor with any sensible criteria for what should be included. It banned the terms BitTorrent, uTorrent, Rapidshare, and Megaupload for example, but still allows Vuze, Transmission, The Pirate Bay, and Mediafire. In fact, BitTorrent and uTorrent seems to be the sole BitTorrent clients that has been banned from Autocomplete.

BitTorrent Inc. rightly finds the filtering overly aggressive, especially since it singles out the company’s legally trademarked name of all things.

“We respect Google’s right to determine algorithms to deliver appropriate search results to user requests,” BitTorrent VP Simon Morris told TF. “That being said, our company’s trademarked name is fairly unique, and we’re pretty confident that anyone typing the first six or seven letters deserves the same easy access to results as with any other company search.”

He pointed out that there are plenty of likewise legitimate BitTorrent search results and that will be affected by the new Autocomplete filter.

As for Megauplaod winding up on the wrong side of the filter the cyberlocker is probably rethinking the recent comments it made about Google also being a “rogue site” which users are able to use for copyright infringement.

“Google probably hosts the world’s largest index of pirated content,” it asked. “What makes them non-rogue?”

Rapidshare is certain to find the filtering particularly offensive being that German courts have repeatedly determined that third parties using the service, and not the site itself, are the ones making copyrighted material “publicly available” and therefore guilty of infringement.

It even took a page from the playbook of its copyright holder critics and hired a Washington, DC-based lobbying firm to convince members of Congress bent on filtering the site via the proposed Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act (COICA) that it caters mainly to “legitimate interests.”

Rapidshare may now want to send the same lobbying outfit to Google HQ to plead its case there.

“In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see where Google goes from here”, says Moya, adding:

“Now that the search engine giant has established a baseline for preventing terms it believes are “being used to find infringing content” from appearing in Autocomplete when will it add more and what will they be?”

In case you missed it first time around, here’s Gargle, doing no evil >>>

• We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours. We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we’ll improve our “counter-notice” tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.
• We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.
• We will improve our AdSense anti-piracy review. We have always prohibited the use of our AdSense program on web pages that provide infringing materials. Building on our existing DMCA takedown procedures, we will be working with rightsholders to identify, and, when appropriate, expel violators from the AdSense program.
• We will experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results. Not surprisingly, we’re big fans of making authorised content more accessible on the Internet. Most users want to access legitimate content and are interested in sites that make that content available to them (even if only on a preview basis). We’ll be looking at ways to make this content easier to index and find.

“These changes build on our continuing efforts, such as Content ID, to give rightsholders choice and control over the use of their content, and we look forward to further refining and improving our processes in ways that help both rightsholders and users”, Google stated

Stay tuned.

Follow me on Twitter.

p2pnet – Why isn’t Google on RIAA hit list?, May 23, 2010
p2pnet – Google to become Corporate Copyright censor, December 2, 2010
later post – RIAA gives Google a pat on the back, December 10, 2010
Zeropaid – Google Begins Filtering Cyberlocker, BitTorrent Search Results, January 26, 2011

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

World War III will be a global information war with no division between civilian & military participation ~ Marshall McLuhan

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 10:13 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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