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Google To Start Punishing Pirate Sites In Search Results
An anonymous reader sends word of a change Google will be making to its search algorithms. Beginning next week, the company will penalize the search rankings of websites who are the target of many copyright infringement notices from rightsholders. Quoting The Verge:
"Google says the move is designed to 'help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily' — meaning that it's trying to direct people who search for movies, TV shows, and music to sites like Hulu and Spotify, not torrent sites or data lockers like the infamous MegaUpload. It's a clear concession to the movie and music industries, who have long complained that Google facilitates piracy — and Google needs to curry favor with media companies as it tries to build an ecosystem around Google Play. Google says it feels confident making the change because because its existing copyright infringement reporting system generates a massive amount of data about which sites are most frequently reported — the company received and processed over 4.3 million URL removal requests in the past 30 days alone, more than all of 2009 combined. Importantly, Google says the search tweaks will not remove sites from search results entirely, just rank them lower in listings."
So no more YouTube search results in Google, then?
Does iTunes let you download the videos to your computer at a time of your own choosing and in a format that will play on all of your devices? If not then it clearly is not superior to pirating and/or just plain ripping your own discs.
I've recently started using iTunes for music and movie rentals and it works flawlessly. So there's no justification of "no good legal alternatives" anymore, as both Spotify and iTunes are actually easier and nicer to use than pirate sites. The same goes for Steam.
Except that iTunes is garbage bloatware.
And doesn't run on Linux.
This has "BAD IDEA" written all over it. Google is going to tweak their ranking based on how many URL removal notices it has received? I smell both a new skill being marketed by SEOs, a new strategy employed by scummy companies to up their ranking, and just a total nightmare for anyone trying to compete with the big content boys. Start making real inroads in content delivery? Get hit by automated takedown notices brought by more-or-less acknowledged affiliates of big content, and watch your Google ranking drop. Maybe this will signal the recurrence of search engines like dogpile.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If a search engine abandon neutrality this way. Then why not avoid violent sites? porn sites? sites with bad spelling? sites that are not political correct? where is the line here?. You must have a line, that you will never cross, because some people will push you more and more.
-Woof woof woof!
Include "site:thepiratebay.se" or similar in your search query. You can even create a Firefox bookmark like this:
Give it a keyword (e.g., "tpb") and then when you type in the URL bar:
Firefox will search for "FOO" at thepiratebay.se. Problem solved.
Liberty in your lifetime
So there's no justification of "no good legal alternatives" anymore
Yes there are:
* Territory restrictions
* DRM
* Format choices
* Encoding Quality
* Content availability
* Not enough choice of stores with a wide selection of content
But perhaps the biggest one:
* Indefensible copyright terms
iTunes movie rentals download and then can be watched at any time for 24 hours after you start watching. They don't stream and you can watch them offline if you want. And their library is pretty big (if you're in the right countries).
Or is anybody here naive enough to believe that nobody will want to fill the incredibly lucrative market which Google appears ready to abandon?
Google will also start punishing site owners who make false claims.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
All copyright terms are defensible. If you don't like somebody's draconian terms, simply find something else to download.
1) Form shell company
2) Have shell company send take down notices about my competitors website
3) Watch them vanish from the search results
4) Profit!
Take Hulu. They pollute global search rankings by pretending to host movies, then refuse to serve any content because you're not in the US. Google, in turn, pretends to serve results that are relevant to your location - and still give back tons of Hulu results regardless of where you are.
No, the beginning was when they removed perfectly reasonable terms from auto-complete (such as "torrent"). Or was it when they started removing search results based on DMCA notices? Or was it when they implemented the mess that is ContentID?
Google really needs to learn to stop appeasing the MPAA, IFPI, et al.; the more concessions it gives them, the more they seem to demand.
If the IFPI and MPAA are finding their "legal" sites* being too low in search rankings, there is a reason for this. And it isn't that Google is rubbish. Google search is designed (one hopes) to direct end users to what they are looking for. Not direct end users to whatever the IFPI, MPAA or whoever want them to see. If people do a search for "[artist] mp3 download", chances are they're not looking for Spotify or iTunes. If there were sites, optimised for search, that offered a similar (or better) service than the dodgy, dubiously-legal ones, we wouldn't have this problem.
*Sites are neither legal or illegal; their operators and users may or may not be acting illegally in various jurisdictions, however these groups don't tend to care about that - they only care about which sites send a cut back to them. Hence their war against the Russian/Ukrainian music sites which operate under national collective licensing systems (soon to role out in the UK), but don't complain when sites such as iTunes or Amazon get caught infringing copyright. Plus there was that little matter with the CRIA not paying however many decades of royalties, and being sued for millions over that...
Taken from the iTunes FAQ at https://support.apple.com/kb/HT2729 :
Videos purchased from the iTunes Store have FairPlay digital rights management embedded in the files
Ie. the videos will only play on devices with FairPlay DRM - support.
Side-note: most of the hits you get when you try to google for illegal media of that variety, are usually fake sites that either want you to pay (most likely for nothing anyway, even if you did), or are just making money off ad hits. And when you do get a file-locker site, most of the time it's expired. So screw them anyway, they mostly deserve to be downranked in listings.
... or ignore them. That's the most reasonable thing to do.
Can you find 70s black sabbath?
Here's the high points from the blog posting:
(1) It's going to be added to the list of over 200 signals, whic meands that if they were equally weighted and there were exactly 200 of them, you are talking about a 0.5% difference in ranking
(2) It may reduce where it appears in the results (read this as: it will not remove it from the results).
Google dropping something from search results because of some editorial policy would make them legally liable when something bad gets through anyway (check out the disclaimers on the "safe search" setting). And given the general bent, they are doubly unlikely to do anything simply to make RIAA/MPAA happier about what's generally acknowledged to be an obsolete business model.
I pirate pdf and djvu scans of out-of-print books, you insensitive clod!
The logical destination is evil. Just ask Anakin.
Google can either stay agnostic, or will become just as bad as the rest and will be tossed aside at some point in the not to distant future.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've recently started using iTunes for music and movie rentals and it works flawlessly. So there's no justification of "no good legal alternatives" anymore, as both Spotify and iTunes are actually easier and nicer to use than pirate sites. The same goes for Steam.
Pop open your iTunes client and do a search for me....(because as far as I know iTunes doesn't run on Linux).
;)
I want you to search for a song I recall from my childhood. My father used to play it on his record player while working in the garage. Being just a kid at the time, I'd sit nearby hammering nails into his workbench while he crafted bookshelves for people. The song is 'Escape'. If something does come up, I guarantee it's wrong. The song I'm looking for is by Michael Garrison from his album "In the Regions of Sunreturn". Nothing? Try Googling for it. You might find a youtube video with the song, or maybe a sample on some music geek's website, but good luck getting a legitimate copy.
Michael Garrison is long dead, and a few years before my father unexpectedly passed away I noticed a copy of the record floating around ThePirateBay. I grabbed it, burned it to a CD and gave it to him on his birthday. He hadn't heard the song since his record collection was destroyed back in the 80s. I never saw him so happy to be listening to a CD. Thank God we have the RIAA to try and stop moments like those.
In the last 10 years I have run into that record twice in all my eBay, CraigsList, and Amazon searching.
So good luck. Once someone creates a fairly complete library of music, along with an easy way to BUY songs (not rent or borrow), and the prices are reasonable--I'll start using it. I'd hate for my kids to grow up and remember a song their dad played in their youth, only to find "Barbie Girl" unavailable and unplayable because it's DRM'd and backed by a bunch of sue-happy lawyers.
Oh--and I'm joking. I hate "Barbie Girl".
There's no place like
Since youtube probably gets like 1000 copyright infringement notices a day, does that mean they will punish their own service and put it at the bottom of the results?
I'd be really happy to use Hulu or get the same content on Netflix as US users but due to an artificial restriction I am unable to. I don't want to have to pay for a proxy or VPN I want to get the same content that is available to US users (and Canadians?). I speak the same language and I have money. Feel free to offer me a product and you can have some of that money.
In other words: I want it exactly my way, under my terms, otherwise I'll just take it.
This is typical of the "Insightful" commentary on this site.
Well, there's something insightful in saying "you could package your product in such a way that I'd give you money, but oddly you're not packaging it that way". I'm certainly willing to pay for games/movies/whatever, and my willingness to pay is almost entirely influcenced by ease of acquisiton and use (price barely comes into it, though I won't be paying $10/episode for a TV show)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yeah, iTunes is great. Lossy digital audio for only 50% more than the priec of a physical CD...
Be thankful you don't have iTunes on Linux. it's such a huge bloated piece of poop on Windows...
If only Android could offer an equally nice user experience on a phone/tablet, then I wouldn't have to use it...
Hey where is the linux client for that. oh wait...
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
What I really wonder is why they are abandoning the idea of giving searchers what they want.
They were really good at that for a while, you know--it's what helped them get their current status.
Oh well, there's always Duck Duck Go.
expandfairuse.org
And yet, Amazon has become the #2 music store by selling unencumbered MP3s that could be easily copied. In other words, they sell:
1. What people want
2. In a format they want
3. That plays on everything
4. Without DRM
And they are making millions doing it. You really should try it instead of breaking the internet.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Price has little to do with it. Look at sales of bottled water if you need further convincing.
Linux has Rhythmbox and Amarok which are equally bloated on top of having terrible user interfaces and terrible code bases.
The song is, on the other hand, on spotify Link
rythmbox isn't all that bad, but even if you don't like its interface or code base or whatever at least you're free to improve it, or you can just whinge
any software license without copyright laws isn't worth a pinch of shit
although even with copyright laws, someone in somalia could still take a piece of gpl sotware an sell it as their own without gpl acknowledgement since somalia isn't a signatory to the berne convention
all the gpl does is give you certain freedoms under copyright, otherwsie gpl software would be copyright by default and you wouldn't be able to use it
You would be amazed. If you are not looking for completely obscure stuff which maybe two people on the whole planet like, but instead would like to have e.g. music which is ONLY sold in Japan (and not available via itunes, amazon, spotify, ... anywhere in the western world), there is an IMMENSE amount of websites which fill that gap (torrents with hundreds or thousands of seeders). I'd like to buy a lot of those CDs, I'd be willing to pay the usual $10 to $15 for an album, but I cannot download the stuff legally as mp3, e.g. via amazon and I cannot buy the physical CD except by ordering in directly in Japan and having it shipped here, which would end up at maybe $60 per CD or so. So I simply download the whole album as FLAC with cover scans like everybody else does.Seems they simply have not realized yet that they are missing out on a lot of money by not offering all the stuff worldwide, which really should not be any problem when you're talking about downloads.
If the quality was lower, then piracy wouldn't be nearly as popular. The truth is that if the movie or TV show is on Blu-Ray, you can pirate it in Blu-Ray quality; actually since the mandatory FBI warning and any trailers are stripped, and since it is instantly accessible with no physical media, it's slightly better than owning the Blu-Ray. The only risk is getting caught, the odds of which are perceived to be very low, getting a virus of some sort, or wasting your time with a completely unrelated file, and those last two problems are virtually solved in the better communities.
Source: I am a filthy pirate, even though I've also bought maybe $30,000-35,000 worth of DVDs in my lifetime.
Oh great. SEO has always been a magnet for black hat web spammers. But that was always, always traceable back to the black hat site in question. Call it "defensive SEO". But now? The actions of unknown third parties can trash a sites ratings -- offensive SEO. And how long will it be before botnet for hire offers to destroy your competitors in way which is essentially impossible to trace. Because SEO is absolutely that petty and specific. The opportunity to harm a competitors Google rating is, for many, too good to pass up.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck I do not want to have to deal with that.
And they are making millions doing it. You really should try it instead of breaking the internet.
Pffbtt... Typical astroturfing I'd expect from a PRMan. No really, you can't break the internet, but you can break a monolithic business model. Pirating isn't the cause of the artists getting the short end of the stick anymore than the consumer getting it. It's the fault of all the board members, middle management, lawyers, and promoters that take a majority of the artists' profits while reducing consumer choice and the quality of the product. Downhill Battle has been faithfully uncovering the egregious excesses of the corporate owners and used to have some nice infographics breaking up the profits by percentages (I tried to find some as they don't appear to be hosted on their site, anymore). I don't know how many studies I've seen that show pirating causes more purchases and how many years, end-to-end, the music and movie industry have made record profits. Do they really expect me to believe that pirating a movie takes away from the profits (read: wages) that the set employees make? Hell no, because set employees (makeup, special effects, lighting, sound) don't get royalties! It's the worst junk propaganda I've seen in years. I find it ironic, yet fitting, that a Youtube user was blocked from displaying a MPAA Public Service Announcement on the grounds that NBC/U owns the copyright.
The Copyfight has reached a point where I only want to pay the artist, directly. I loved the idea Radiohead used for "In Rainbows" as they received all the money donated (minus PayPal or the credit gateway fees). I'd like to just give bands cash, from my hand, so they get it all..... no middle-man making money, even if it's just 2-5 percent. If anything, maybe Flattr can start gaining traction as a way to say 'thanks' to all the wonderful artists who give their work away on YouTube and Vimeo for free. Hopefully musicians aren't constrained from putting some sort of donation/appreciation link on their websites by a contract; and without giving a dime back to their publisher (of whom should be so grateful they are representing such talent!). When it comes down to it, I want to really own the music or media I purchase. I don't want to wake up to find out Amazon or Apple has deleted something from one of many devices I own (e.g., Amazon: George Orwell's "1984"; Apple: Siri app pre 4s).
I found a study ("Meh. The Irrelevance of Copyright in the Public Mind" by Brett Lunceford & Shane Lunceford) about the public's seeming irreverence to copyright (I have a feeling there are segments of the population that pirate music just to spite the corporate oligarchy). They think this indifference has existed since recording instruments were mass-produced. It's not as if people were even consciously aware they were breaking any laws back then. If anything, I bet more than a few musicians and would-be corporate overlords that had a reel-to-reel back in the 50s made illegal recordings to share with their friends. I remember a friend of my father who made copies of Laserdiscs onto VCR tapes and gave them to his friends --and he even made simple short movies taking choice scenes from movies much like I added Simpsons or Ren and Stimpy soundclips between songs on my mix-tapes. I think it's simple.... reducing the choice of the consumer to use the media they purchase reduces creativity (and commerce), overall. Until then, people will always find a way to circumvent any roadblocks; real or perceived.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Steam is really the only one i get behind. They've gotten it perfectly and it's made them and developers a ton of money. Frequent sales, contests, promotions gets people excited and really reward impulse purchasers. iTunes is ok for music, though I'm not at all convinced its the best way. It's certainly not at all what I'm looking for in video entertainment, I'm pretty happy with Netflix for that. It has lots of interesting shows to watch and makes it nice and easy and keeps track of what you've seen. The recommendations are fairly good, especially if you are faithful with rating programs. I have used Hulu a fair amount, never bought Hulu+ though, It would be hard to get me to pay for content with commercials, especially in the middle. I would accept one or two minutes of commercial(s) before I watched any given movie or tv episode. Frankly though I just don't care to see the commercials and would prioritize lack of commercials as high as affordability and depth of catalog. Most importantly I don't want to pay per episode, I want flat rate monthly pricing. Music I'm willing to pay per unit, tv i want flat rate. Movie I could understand paying for each, but I'm not that much into the current movie scene. I find tv series to be much better sans commercials and on demand, 22 or 44 minutes a pop, no commercials, it's a whole new improved way to watch tv. Ally Mcbeal, Doctor Who, The Wonder Years and That 70s Show are among the shows I'm currently watching.
nobody's perfect
It's a-okay because your feelings have been hurt
No, it's a-okay because artificial scarcity is a crock that causes huge amounts of harm. The amount of destroyed value is insane. Ignoring such idiocy is the sensible thing to do.
Except that the copyright industry has made sure their terms apply to ALL content. Play ANY music no matter how it is licensed and the copyright industry collects payment for it. You cannot escape it legally and forcing them to return illegal collections or actually paying out illegal collections to copyright owners that are long dead or do not want the money is impossible.
If you created your own music and played it on your own radio show, you would have to pay for your own music and then have a hell of time trying to collect the money due to you minus a hefty fee if you ever get it.
Only a serf would claim copyright is fair.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Compare to the copyright-proponent's argument: I control this information, I can tell you how you can use it, I say who can use it, and I can revoke that whenever I want. BTW, I didn't even make it, I just bought it.
Copyright is a failed concept.
Great Intellect...
Here's an idea: what's preventing us from writing a Firefox plugin that auto-indexes all sites that we visit (except when in privacy mode -- or perhaps only when in a new discovery mode?)? This local index will then be shared with other machines running the same plugin and virtually combined into a big global index. Since there's no site that won't be one day visited with such a search-enabled browser, the index will likely cover most of the Internet. This way, we get rid of Google and other centralized search engines; and therefore get rid of corporate censorship.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Linking this to big media is so easy, it's automatic.
But many times when I did search for some piece of media, I would get nothing but torrent links on the first or even second page, where in reality I was looking for any interesting sites that would talk about the plot of a movie I didn't quite "get". They do have a point in that torrent sites preempt everything else in many situations, and they have an interest in protecting the main functionality of their site, which is finding people relevant info.