Google and Bing Have No Obligation To Censor Searches For Torrents (betanews.com)

Microsoft and Google are under no obligation to weed out 'torrent' results from their respective search engines, the High Court of Paris has ruled. BetaNews adds: French music industry group SNEP went to court on behalf of a trio of artists, requesting that Microsoft and Google automatically filter out links to pirated material. The group had called for a complete block on searches that include the word 'torrent' as well as blocking sites whose name includes the word. The court found that SNEP's request was far too broad, saying: "SNEP's requests are general, and pertain not to a specific site but to all websites accessible through the stated methods, without consideration for identifying or even determining the site's content, on the premise that the term 'Torrent' is necessarily associated with infringing content".The court added that 'torrent' is a common noun, which has a range of different meanings.

Comments

.torrent!=pirated

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everything bittorrent is pirated content. Lots of Linux distributions offer torrent files as an alternative download method (often much faster than the mirrors), for example.

Re:.torrent!=pirated

[godrik]

Doesn't blizzard distribute its update using bittorrent?

Sounds like it is : http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/c...

Re:.torrent!=pirated

[Fire_Wraith]

Yes.
Torrents are a protocol relating to efficient and distributed file transfer, that in no way is inherently piratical or illegal. There are legitimate uses for the protocol, even if piracy of music and entertainment is a fairly common use, too. Even if these groups got what they wanted, and people weren't allowed to search for "torrent", guess about how long before a new term would come into common use meaning the exact same thing? Hint: not long.

Strike!

[pete6677]

French musicians will now strike in the streets, blocking traffic and blaring awful music in protest.