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.

Comments

Algorithms Can Be Patented

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't a search engine just applying a ranking algorithm to content? Didn't think algorithms could be patented.

Re:Algorithms Can Be Patented

[Anonymous Coward]

Then how come I don't know how it works?

Google doesn't patent it - they keep it secret.

Google PageRank is patented. http://www.google.com/patents/..., by Stanford where Page developed it, and which licensed the patent to Google for shares worth $336 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Re:Algorithms Can Be Patented

[PCM2]

If you don't know how it works, it's only because you haven't bothered to look it up.

Not exactly. You only know how PageRank worked at the very beginning, when it was patented. That is far from "the" Google search algorithm these days. It remains one of the most important ones, and possibly one that's fundamental to how Google's whole search engine works, but they have many, many other algorithms that govern search results today. Most of these are not patented, mainly for the reasons mentioned earlier: If Google patented them, it would have to disclose how they work. Instead, they maintain them as trade secrets, like the formula for Coca-Cola.

In Disney's case, I think it's not really interested in competing with Google. It would much rather Google, Bing, etc look at its patent, say "OK, I can do that if it will get Disney off my back" and implement the patent for little-to-no royalty fees.

Re:Algorithms Can Be Patented

[penguinoid]

What I'd like to know is why Disney would create a search engine that won't find any of Disney's products, and instead take you to the original stories they stole from to make their animations?

Re:Algorithms Can Be Patented

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re: Algorithms Can Be Patented

[Garridan]

I'm a grad student with a patent. It's a pretty sweet deal for all involved parties. I can't afford to get a patent. The university can, though. They file for a patent in my name, and I keep a large percentage of the proceeds, should it ever get licensed. It's potential revenue for them, with nonzero costs -- did you know, you have to pay for patent renewal year to year? On the rare occasion that a google happens, the university wins big... but obviously Page isn't dead broke in a gutter somewhere. They helped him get off his feet in a number of ways; he'd have lost a much larger slice if he'd gotten private help starting his business.

Re:Algorithms Can Be Patented

[Anonymous Coward]

They are patenting it, not implementing it. This way no one else can implement it.

Re:Algorithms Can Be Patented

[tlhIngan]

They are patenting it, not implementing it. This way no one else can implement it.

This is Disney. They're going to get the law changed to FORCE everyone to implement it (and of course, pay them the requisite licensing fees).

It's how Disney got Macrovision through back in the early days (it failed on early VCRs because their AGCs were slow, so by forcing lawmakers to have it implemented, everyone had to tighten things up).

You know Disney's heading to the lawmakers shortly to get Google etc., to have it in.

Actually no...

[Anonymous Coward]

"...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.

Re:Actually no...

[AK Marc]

To be more precise, when people go searching for things, they want to make sure they're getting unbiased results.

People don't care about "unbiased". They care about "useful". Getting results of all DRM movies would be very un-useful to some. The "pirated" copies work on phones, PCs, consoles, and just about everything. The DRM versions are more restricted. The utility of the result is more important than "bias".

Yeah baby!

[Frosty Piss]

It will be bigger than Bing! At last a search engine that can take on Google.

Why is this a patent ? Also : useless.

[aepervius]

1) Why a sort of software filtering of search results depending on some criteria are a patent in any way shape or form ? Probably only valid in the US anyway.

2) how do they suppose this should work if other search engine do not use that filtering.

So they patented this because....?

[complete loony]

... they *don't* want other search engines to use this?

Or are they planning to somehow force search engines to license the process?

Re:So they patented this because....?

[NiteMair]

Probably the latter.

I'm guessing the next step in their evil plan is to convince congress to pass some law making such mechanisms mandatory in the U.S. - at which point they will license the tech and profit.

Face it, Disney loves to lobby congress, they have done so successfully for many decades.

Re:So they patented this because....?

[Calydor]

That was my thought as well. This is the perfect excuse for Google to shrug and say, "Welp, we can't do that ourselves now and we don't want to pay the license. Sorry fellas, ThePirateBay hits the #1 spot for 'disney movie' searches."

Re:So they patented this because....?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just love how bribery is called "lobbying" in the US.

Authenticity?

[Shillo]

I'm sure this "invention" will correctly attribute Snow White to Brothers Grimm and not Disney. Right?

How did they manage that?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...)

Re:Does it matter?

[93 Escort Wagon]

People use Google.

Some of us use DuckDuckGo.

shot in own foot

[belmolis]

I think that Disney may have shot themselves in the foot. A patent must by definition describe the method in sufficient detail that a person of ordinary expertise in the field can figure out how to implement it by reading the patent. Since the patent merel describes a ranking algorithm, it can be trivially inverted to select sites likely to contain pirated material.

Wow, that's funny!

[sjames]

They design a search engine that implements their wet dream for them and then because they are what they are, they make sure nobody will use it by slapping a patent on it! They are their own worst enemy!

Shooting themselves in the foot

[JazzXP]

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...

They Filed on Sep 9 2010

[ameline]

They filed over 4 years ago. If they haven't got a working search engine by now based on this, they never will. 4 years is forever in internet time.

Never mind that any search engine using this is very unlikely to make a dent in google.

I think their strategy is to "shame" google et al into doing more -- "look, see we got a patent on a means of eliminating piracy, proving that it *IS* possible, therefore you have to do more to prevent piracy."
Ignoring the fact that the existence of a patent proves nothing about whether the invention actually *works*. (I say this as someone who holds a number of patents -- all of mine work -- I filed them after I had them coded and working. But it would have been just as easy to make all of it up and code nothing.)

This is great

[frovingslosh]

I don't want to question too much the validity of this patent. I'm just glad that a corrupt organization like Disney got the patent. That way other search engines will think twice and not risk implementing any sort of "authenticity" factors" in their searches. So Disney can go ahead and have searches that favor Disney in their own search engine, but will have to avoid doing that. Great move Disney. What other things that would have favored you are you going to patent so that others can't do?

Standard technical measures

[tepples]

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).