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Google Removes Kazaa Links, Keeps Sponsored Links
SanityInAnarchy writes "Everyone should remember when Google removed several links that Sharman (owner of Kazaa) claimed were infringing their copyrights. At first, only real results were touched and sponsored links left alone. Well, that sponsored link was removed, but there are quite a few left on a search for 'Kazaa Lite' that, if they aren't infringing Kazaa copyrights, openly advocate piracy. Well, maybe not quite, but I still can't believe they expect that phrases like 'complete albums,' 'full-length movies,' and 'Napster lives' are to be interpreted as '100% legal.'"
I keep seeing this posted all over the place but, I don't know where the quote? is from. Can someone clue me in?
and it's still not hard to find links with kazaa lite, or anything to do with illegal nature.
a far more pressing issue for me is why doesn't google remove links for "kiddie porn" or "illegal porn" or "rape pics" or something?
or is it a case of one rule for one, another for everybody else?
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
It seems that there's been a trend lately for blaming a search engine for what can be found using its services. It is not google's responsibility to maintain the content of the Internet.
... it is not their fault if some comes up.
If i search google for "Child pornography"
If I search for mp3s or full movie rips, its not their fault. They are an indexing service, not a filtering service, nor a content provider.
blah people are stupid.
no comment
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
Psst..... both infringe on copyrights!
The difference is that the other copyrights aren't held by Sharman.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
So now instead of these sites being deep in the list of results, they are now front and center, and probably getting far more hits then they were before the notice was sent.
By this logic, SanityInAnarchy's own post would be illegal, as the post uses the exact same words that it suggests should in some way be illegal to search for or index. Once we have forbidden words we have a very small step to forbidden thought.
One can argue that the piracy should be illegal, but it's a far stretch to say that a link with any of these phrases should not exist on Google. There are invalid uses of the phrases, but there are many valid uses as well, including a group that might not wish to sell their soul to a major label and the RIAA and might want to make their "complete albums" freely downloadable on the Internet. It's a shame or worse that an RIAA mentality might hamper their ability to do so.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I like Kazaa (Lite), and am very technical. Not at all because it's easy, either. It's by far the biggest network around, and that means something when you're looking for more esoteric content. You know, like kiddy porn.
I'd like to see a cross platform solution take off and leave the shady KMD and its almost equally shady hack in the dust, but until that happens it'll remain yet another reason I keep a Windows box on my network (but only with NAT behind OpenBSD).
Game... blouses.
Go after the sites themselves for infringement, not search engines
Look at it this way. Whats the easiest way to go after the multitude of sites that one might intrepret as infringing? Easy, go after the search engines. Theyre the ones used as hub to find these sites. Is it fair, not really, but is a hell of a lot cheaper that going after 1000 sites. The engines want to stay alive, so they comply. Sure they make a stand when ever they can ( some of them ) but in general, self preservation wins.
As somone on the other side of those ads (LEGAL ones, I assure you), I DO recall a solution to this problem. If the term Kazaa is trademarked (I'm not sure if it is or not), KaZaa can cite a trademark violation and Google will take the ads down.
Of course, Google gets payed everytime a searcher clicks on that Kazaa Lite ad, so they probably won't PROACTIVELY take them down. Would YOU shut down a revenue source like that??
They didn't remove hate across the board. They removed it in Germany, which has extremely strict hate speech laws, which Google was probably running afoul of.
Nor did they say anything about copyright infringement being wrong. They complied with a DMCA request. The DMCA being the evil thing that it is, they were, quite likely, in violation of it.
In other words, both cases were not Google being evil, they were the law being evil. Google is not the legislative body in either the US or Germany, so that's not really their fault.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
The IANA of course delegate the right to distribute IP address blocks to the RIRs(RFC 2050), who in turn do so to the ISPs. Thus any other search engine can prepare a spider-generated (or otherwise) list of results. For Google to remove a few links from their results does not in anyway change the reality that the IP addresses continue to exist and therefore potentially contravene the DMCA(not that I agree with this in the first place). the IANA, RIRs and ISPs therefore potentially contravene the DMCA - why then would Google take the step of removing links from their results? I'm sure Google has some kind of disclaimer relating to URLs people visit from their results - you can visit more gross sites than kazaalite!
Full Disclosure: I deployed some CRM software for Google in 2000
I think robots should be used for indexing because of privacy concerns (I don't think it's good when anyone can check who visits which website when), and robots.txt should definately be honored by a search engine. There are good reasons to include some parts of some websites from the serach engines, and robots.txt is the way to specify that.
I do like the idea of a p2p web indexing and search system, but I think this can be successful only if it's fast. (If it isn't fast too few people will use it, and then it cannot possibly work well.)
I think this calls for serious computer science research into how to make such a system sufficiently fast.
...legality is a function of locality...
...to qualify under "fair use".
Not all localities have the legality of "fair use", so should search engines be subject to infringement laws there? Or is their moral right to fair use less subjective than other morals?
--I don't want the world, I just want your half.
BitTorrent wasn't even intended as a P2P piracy tool, it was to help serve up big files that hammer servers, like Linux isos. Anybody stupid enough to run a BitTorrent server with copyrighted material, and leave it up where the public can find it, is begging to be fucked over by the RIAA's lawyers.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
I email this to press@google.com because doing this will definitely get press attention. I'm assuming that the engineers and programmers still run Google and that they are concerned about the chilling effects of the DMCA.
Want to wake up the current population about just how bad the DMCA is? When you search for the DMCA, first link that comes up is an anti-DMCA site. It's obvious that Google is concerned about the DMCA....
Just for one day change the front page of Google to a page that says:
----
THIS PAGE SHUT DOWN DUE TO THE D.M.C.A.
Please contact your Congressperson. Have a nice day.
----
Now just imagine the fire storm...
Google is the best search engine out there. You won't lose people by doing this. This will be the single best way to inform others about the dangers of the DMCA.
I hope this is taken seriously. Please pass it to your supervisor.
cheers
xxxx
In essance it would be like a the DMOZ Opend Directory Project except with P2P bots instead of manual maintanance.
For example Node A searches only for movie reviews. Anyone seaching for anything related to movie reviews would be pointed to Node A.
Node B would find results for movie stars and therefore be linked up to Node A.
Each node could could handle multiple subjects and many nodes could have redundant subject coverage.
It wouldn't necessarily be a direct replacement for Google but it could provide some interesting results.
This is like demanding Enron being removed from the yellowpages. Control search engines and you control the net I guess, this is one of the bigger problems of the DMCA. Linking should not be illegal regardless of the site.
Let them fight their battles, but leave unaffiliated third-parties out of it. Google has nothing to do with kazaalite, google has nothing to do with scientology, etc. You would think a GOP administration would defend business like google and free speech, but the DMCA has yet to be challenged and Ashcroft has no problem using it for his own end.
I don't want a goverment sanitized search engine, I want the rawest information I can get.
BTW, the real Kazaa Lite has no sponsored links on Google. Those links take you to mp3downloadhq.com, which is just a money making scheme ("Only $1 a Month!"), whereas Kazaa Lite is completely free.