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Google and Microsoft To Crackdown On Piracy Sites In Search Results (telegraph.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the tightening-the-screws dept.

Google and Microsoft pledged on Monday to crack down on sites hosting pirated content that show up on their search engines. In what is being called a first of its kind agreement, Google and Microsoft's Bing will demote U.K. search results of copyright infringing websites. From a report on The Telegraph: The search engine operators have signed up to a clampdown that will see the UK's copyright watchdog monitor the search results they provide for unlawful websites. The agreement follows years of campaigning by record labels and film studios, which have accused Google and Microsoft of turning a blind eye to piracy and dragging their feet over measures to protect copyright online. Under a new voluntary code, the tech giants have committed to demote websites that have repeatedly been served with copyright infringement notices, so that they do not appear on the first page for common searches.

7 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. DuckDuckGo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This should pump up traffic to DuckDuckGo.

    1. Re:DuckDuckGo by ls671 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Are you sure?

      DuckDuckGo emphasizes getting information from the best sources rather than the most sources, generating its search results from key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yummly.[5][6]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
  2. uhhh... by ckatko · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they're removing them "now", what the hell were they doing before? Results are already riddled with DMCA takedown removed results. Google has been publishing the list of these removed URLs for years:

    https://www.google.com/transpa...

    Also, FUN FACT. They're not doing what they say because they never do what they say. If they REALLY went after copyright infringing websites they'd take down:

      - Google+
      - Facebook
      - YouTube
      - Reddit
      - Twitter
      - Imgur

    Those places are FULL of copyrighted information and nobody bats an eye.

  3. In the UK by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So the UK will get its own censored version of Google and Bing, like China. I'm sure they're proud of their new found greatness. Look at us, we can make Google do as we say. Yeah, you told them to shot you in the foot and they obliged. Idiots.

  4. Don't worry by HideyoshiJP · · Score: 4, Funny

    Microsoft shouldn't worry. You wouldn't have been able to find those results with Bing anyway, much less anything you were actually searching for.

  5. No more YouTube results in Google searches? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >> demote websites that have repeatedly been served with copyright infringement notices

    So...you're saying that we'll stop seeing YouTube results in Google searches?

  6. Lumen Database by quenda · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Google is so Alta Vista now.

    Lumen Database is now the king of piracy search engines.
    Just enter the movie/song title into the search box and see all the DMCA complaints, which list all the URLs for that movie.
    Let the MPAA and RIAA do all the hard indexing work for you. Thanks guys!

    example: here are 300 ways to get The Force Awakens. Good job team.