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Disney Patents a Piracy Free Search Engine
wabrandsma writes with this excerpt from Torrentfreak: Disney has just obtained a patent for a search engine that ranks sites based on various "authenticity" factors. One of the goals of the technology is to filter pirated material from search results while boosting the profile of copyright and trademark holders' websites. A new patent awarded to Disney Enterprises this week describes a search engine through which pirated content is hard to find. Titled "Online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for web elements," one of the patent's main goals is to prevent pirated movies and other illicit content from ranking well in the search results. According to Disney their patent makes it possible to "enable the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites." Disney believes that current search engines are using the wrong approach as they rely on a website's "popularity." This allows site owners to game the system in order to rank higher. "For example, a manipulated page for unauthorized sales of drugs, movies, etc. might be able to obtain a high popularity rating, but what the typical user will want to see is a more authentic page," they explain. Probably not a good place to look for a grey-market copy of Song of the South.
"...enable the filtering of undesirable search results" - Undesirable for whom?
"...but what the typical user will want to see is a more authentic page" - That's an interesting assertion, but I don't think that's actually true.
"...rely on a website's "popularity."" - Popular represents what people want, not these bogus 'authentic' (read 'expensive, DRM infested frustrations') metrics.
This basically boils down to "unless we sell it there's no way to get it". An interesting idea, but fail.
Disney chose a non-piracy-themed 'authenticity' metric because they are Disney; but how did they manage to sneak any variation of "Yeah, a search engine; but weighted on Metric X, as well as popularity!" past the patent office?
In the arms race between search engines and SEO abhumans, naive popularity became obsolete almost immediately, and made assorted additional weights, filters, and heuristics both necessary and obvious(at a general level, specific ones or specific implementations of one may well be nontrivial or even brilliant; but the fact that naive popularity is now the road to linkfarm hell is news to no one.)
Weighting for copy-cop-correctness is somewhat novel, since the customer demand isn't obvious; but I'm still not seeing how you can scrape an entire patent out of that(especially when the guys in the Patent and Trademark office have probably heard of the "Let's have a big list of registered trademarks for the sake of authenticity in commerce" concept once or twice before...)
People use Google.
Some of us use DuckDuckGo.
#DeleteChrome
Initially, the patent will prevent Google from being able to do this (without risking litigation for patent infringement). But....its presence will convince lawmakers that something like this is technologically possible, so they will just pass a law making this required. Once that is done, Google will be legally forced to licence this patent from Disney and use it.
The fact that it doesn't work well, and will have harmful side effects for legitimate sites, won't come into play.
Doesn't this mean that search engines can freely show pirate content (including Disney content) for people to find now and not lose any safe harbour provisions? Otherwise they'd be infringing patents...
Isn't a search engine just applying a ranking algorithm to content? Didn't think algorithms could be patented.
Regardless of whether it's patentable... does anybody really need a search engine that only returns sites "certified" by Disney? Really?
I trust Disney to certify sites about as much as I would trust government to do it. Which is to say: about zero.
Unless Disney manages to get a court to rule that a search engine forfeited its OCILLA safe harbor for not licensing this patent, claiming that the patented invention has become one of the "standard technical measures" as defined in 17 USC 512(i)(2).