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UK MPs: Google Blocks Child Abuse Images, It Should Block Piracy Too
nk497 writes "If Google can block child abuse images, it can also block piracy sites, according to a report from MPs, who said they were 'unimpressed' by Google's 'derisorily ineffective' efforts to battle online piracy, according to a Commons Select Committee report looking into protecting creative industries. John Whittingdale MP, the chair of the Committee — and also a non-executive director at Audio Network, an online music catalogue — noted that Google manages to remove other illegal content. 'Google and others already work with international law enforcement to block for example child porn from search results and it has provided no coherent, responsible reason why it can't do the same for illegal, pirated content,' he said."
Child porn can be identified without input from the content creator (looking at content is all that's needed), piracy cannot, you need to ask the content creator if it's piracy, and real piracy will attempt to hide who is the content creator to make that process difficult (and often the content creator will lie, we've seen this happen many times over on youtube where a big network steals some youtube content and then send them a takedown request for posting the content that the network decided to steal).
So to actually implement this google would have to accept inputs from supposid content creators to have whatever they want blocked, that sounds ripe for abuse to me, maybe I'll get these MPs' sites blocked for pirating "my" content.
To reply to myself. Sentences for making child porn on the first page of search result is 25+ years. Texas being most awesome by handing out a 290 year sentence! Go Texas.
>Child pornography is quite obvious without further investigation
Not really.
* Female parent takes a photo of her child naked in the bath as some kind of happy memory, which she then uses to embarass him in front of his first girlfriend or whatever when looking at a family album (heck, who doesn't have parents like that?)
* Drawings classify in the UK (which is something I don't agree with), which bans a lot of Japanese stuff (I can have sex with a 16-year-old girl, but can't have a drawing of a 17-year-old anime character naked)
* 16-year-old takes a photo of his 16-year-old girlfriend naked
Real child abuse is abhorrant, but might not be easily recongizable either.
Say, if a six-year-old got punched in the face by another six-year-old to the point where it left a bruise. I'm sure you'd have people whispering that his father did it or something.
Your point about intent and effect is entirely valid...except that the question here is not about how you would define "child porn," but how the law does. And under the law, all of the examples you describe are classified as child porn. This is a problem, yes, but it's not relevant to the current argument. Google must adhere to the law, and they do.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I'm pretty sure possession of pirated content is illegal too.
I guess it depends on where you live, in my country it's a civil offence. Not illegal though. Then again I've long since come to the conclusion that Cicero was right on the subject of "laws being made, to simply criminalize the population" to paraphrase. What's funny, is that people think this is new...except when it's not.
Om, nomnomnom...
They can't block "piracy sites" because they don't exist. I get my Linux images from these "pirate sites" so they're not pirate sites. It's user uploads that are the problem.
Okay a more concrete example. Would you consider censoring this very famous photo that appears in this Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc). The photo meets all the mechanical criteria for a child abuse photo. Sure, it should be easy to put exceptions for such famous images into your child porn recognition algorithm, but this would mean erecting a prude's verion of the Great Firewall, crewed by gatekeepers who decide whether it's okay for the masses to see a controversial image.
I think it's reasonable that the time and effort a creator puts behind a work is rewarded appropriately.
The "piracy" conflict is mostly down to the music mogul's definition of "appropriate".
Remember that the actual artists very rarely get paid, if at all (see Internet for further details...)
That is true. Ironically, piracy is a misnomer. Most music studios long ago convinced the courts that the music wasn't tangible personal property to get around various sales and use taxes (in the US anyway). As such, by definition, it can't be piracy as there is not tangible property to steal. It may be a copyright violation, but even that is questionable as a downloaded mp3 is not the same as the original work or even the the uploaded mp3 (different electrons, arranged differently on the magnetic media). In reality, it is a contract violation between the original purchaser and the studio. But since the studio can't tell who the original purchaser is, they go after everybody else (and pay politicians to change laws to permit it).
But, be clear, piracy, by it's very nature requires tangible personal property, which electronic media, by definition is not.
Okay. I'm sure you can cite many examples of copyrighted child porn to back up your argument.
I think I know someone who can help you with that.