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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.
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
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...
... 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'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?
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.
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.