Tim Wu, the legal scholar credited with coining the oft used term “net neutrality” was hired by Yelp to conduct research into Google’s search algorithm. Wu, along with Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca and researchers at Yelp, examined whether Google gives consumers the best results. The results don’t look good. Per Recode.net:
Google knowingly manipulates search results according to a research paper published Monday from several academics. The study presents evidence that the search giant sets out to hamper competitors and limit consumers’ options. The paper lands as Google prepares to release its response to the European Union investigation, which rests on similar claims about Google’s comparison-shopping product.
Meanwhile, in the EU a new website Focus on the User (http://www.focusontheuser.eu/) has been set up to publicize the issue, charging, “Google+ is hurting the Internet. Europeans have the power to stop it.” Along with a rundown of the various ways Google manipulates search results to favor its own product via Google+ the website offers a video explainer (below).
2. 40 State Attorneys Generals file amicus brief in support of subpoena process to investigate Google
Attorneys General from 40 states have filed in amicus brief in support of Mississippi’s AG Jim Hood’s efforts to subpoena Google. In the brief they ask a U.S. Appeals Court to overturn a preliminary injunction issued last March by U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate that blocked Hood’s efforts to investigate Google’s anti-consumer business practices. From the brief:
As is evident from the letters of record signed by multiple Attorneys General, Mississippi is not the only state with concerns about Google’s consumer practices. (See ROA.1199-1200, ROA.1243-1244, ROA.1245-1246). Mississippi, like every state, is entitled to address these concerns through further investigation utilizing proper tools, including administrative subpoenas. Mississippi, like every state, also is entitled to review information gathered pursuant to its investigation and make decisions about actions to take—or not take—to enforce its consumer protection laws for its citizens. Google may challenge Mississippi’s Subpoena consistent with state law. But Google should not be allowed to bypass state subpoena review processes and derail a legitimate state consumer protection investigation by filing premature declaratory judgment lawsuits and obtaining sweeping preliminary injunctions in federal court. Both the law and public policy counsel against it.
3. Google accused of eavesdropping
According to an article published in The Guardian, Google is also under fire from privacy advocates for incorporating technology into its Chrome browser that allows eavesdropping.
“Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room,” said Rick Falkvinge, the Pirate party founder, in a blog post. “Which means that your computer had been stealth configured to send what was being said in your room to somebody else, to a private company in another country, without your consent or knowledge, an audio transmission triggered by … an unknown and unverifiable set of conditions.”
Scott Cleland, a noted Google critic, points out that it’s business as usual in comments posted on his Precursor Blog:
This is not an isolated incident. It is a part of a broader Google pattern of behavior.
What should be big news and scandalous here is that the company that has gathered the most Internet users in the world based upon public representations of being pro-privacy and open — is secretly engaged in widespread wiretapping.
June Gloom for Googleiath
Earlier this month Google was slapped down by a Canadian appeals court, Its judges were not impressed by Google’s specious “free speech” arguments and affirmed a lower court ruling mandating Google remove certain search results (linking to illegal products) on a worldwide basis.
As regulators in Europe continue to tighten the vise, perhaps this summer will be a turning point in efforts to hold Google accountable for its bad business practices. Stay tuned…
When Google removes a pirate link from search it redirects users to very same link on Chilling Effects
Search for Gravity on Google, look for a result that’s been removed, click link provided and you’re taken to a list of infringing links for the same movie, making it easy to find and watch pirated copy of the film
Google received a lot of positive press recently with its announcement that notorious pirate sites would be demoted in its search results, but just take a look for a second at how disingenuous that claim is, and how truly duplicitous its business practices actually are. Bear with me as I explain…
Google brags that it’s a leader in fighting online piracy, making this pronouncement in its latest PR missive, its updated “How Google Fights Piracy” report:
Be Efficient, Effective, and Scalable. Google strives to implement anti-piracy solutions that work. For example, beginning in 2010, Google has made substantial investments
in streamlining the copyright removal process for search results.
The report goes on:
Nevertheless, online piracy still remains a challenge, and Google takes that challenge seriously. We develop and deploy anti-piracy solutions with the support of hundreds of Google employees.
This braggadocio makes for good soundbites but is really just more corporate baloney. In truth, here’s what really happens when Google removes pirate links from search results in response to a DMCA takedown notice:
Search for a free (pirated) movie
Review results and find one removed due to a DMCA notice, the link replaced by this statement:
Click the link “read the DMCA complaint.”
Arrive at a list that includes the missing pirate link along with a bunch of others infringing links (courtesy of Chilling Effects)
Click one of the listed pirate links and go directly to (free) movie
So, let’s get this straight…Google waxes on how “seriously” it tackles online piracy, about how hard hundreds of employees work to “deploy anti-piracy solutions” yet–with a wink, wink and a nudge, nudge–it redirects users to the very same links it boasts about removing. Google could just as well call this its “link-finder” tool.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at the examples above and below. I chose a couple recent, popular films (Dracula Untold and Gravity), searched on Google, ended up at Chilling Effects and–voilà—quickly found what I was looking for. In fact, I didn’t find just one infringing link, but dozens.
How convenient! This makes it much easier to find a pirated copy of the film. Thanks Google. 🙂 Thanks Chilling Effects. 🙂 Thanks for protecting online pirates and ensuring that free (stolen) movies remain easy-to-find online no matter how many DMCA takedown notices filmmakers and musicians send in an effort to safeguard their work.
Searched for Dracula Untold on Google, found result that’s been removed, clicked the link provided and ended up at list that included a bunch of working pirate links for same movie
I’m sure attorneys for Google and Chilling Effects have made sure that this setup conforms to the law while they publicly defend the operation as providing “transparency.” Google admits as much on its own web pages:
We link in our search results to the requests published by Chilling Effects in place of removed content when we are able to do so legally.
And, while both entities may follow the letter of the DMCA, clearly neither Google nor Chilling Effects care much about respecting its intent. It’s also worth noting that Google’s report on piracy fails mention its “legal” reposting of pirate links or its connection to Chilling Effects.
If folks at Google were seriously interested in doing something about online piracy, do you really believe they would provide direct links to the very same infringing content its employees had worked so hard to remove?
I came across a story published on today’s Torrent Freak highlighting the conflict between content creators and Google over the search giant’s search results that routinely point to pirated content. As I pointed out in a blog post last week, despite Google’s much ballyhooed August announcement that they would downgrade (not remove) search results for sites routinely reported for piracy, not much has changed.
Per TorrentFreak, and in typical Google fashion, Google’s Legal Director Fred von Lohmann, employs the oft-used boilerplate, disingenuous refrain that the rise in takedown requests could be considered an attack on free speech:
“As policymakers evaluate how effective copyright laws are, they need to consider the collateral impact copyright regulation has on the flow of information online.”
Von Lohmann goes on to complain that when Google instituted their “new” search ranking policy, they received more than 250,000 takedown requests per week and that number has grown to more than 2.5 million. While von Lohmann characterizes this trend as evidence that “flow of information online” is being obstructed, I see it as evidence that there is a ton of infringing content/product online that has, until now, efficiently flowed (via Google search) from thief to consumer, impervious to any limit or law. Why should we have sympathy for sites linking to pirated or counterfeit goods? How is that an attack on free speech? It’s not.
Why is that the rights of piracy’s victims–the content creators large and small who work to create films, music, books and more–are discounted in favor of thieves who profit from their crimes? Check out those reported search results and you will find hundreds of websites that make money by distributing access to pirated/stolen goods, some in digital form, some as tangible (counterfeit) products. Marc Miller, MPAA’s Senior Vice President for Internet Content Protection points out this inconsistency in TorrentFreak:
“Google’s reading of the data is missing some critical perspective: if the process is cumbersome for Google, it is even more cumbersome for the creators and makers who must constantly be on the lookout to protect their work from theft,”
Piracy apologists like to focus on erroneous takedowns and highlight stories whereby a 9 year-old in Finland had her computer confiscated, or a grandmother in Colorado had her ISP account wrongfully suspended. Certainly mistakes happen, and when they do it’s unfortunate, but they are few and far between when compared with the cumulative harm being done to those whose livelihoods are damaged by rampant online theft. For every search result removed in error there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, removed for valid reasons. Sensationalistic anecdotes make for splashy headlines and provide convenient red-herrings for those who defend the piracy status quo–big bad Hollywood versus the grandmothers of the world–but meanwhile the genuine stories documenting piracy’s ruin are routinely minimized or ignored.
Also lost in this debate is the fact that if one takes the time to read the DMCA, it’s easy to see that the law actually favors the reported party, not the other way around. If a site has been removed in error, the owner can use the Google website to file a counter-claim with a click of a mouse. That immediately puts the onus on the party that filed the original DMCA request to go to court and prove the legitimacy of their claim. If that next step isn’t taken, the takedown becomes moot. Filing a court case is a costly endeavor so it’s unlikely that those whose file false DMCA claims, whether in error or purposely, would bother to spend money to enforce a bogus DMCA. Conversely, those content creators who don’t have deep pockets have little recourse when it comes to enforcing a valid DMCA takedown if the other party, representing an infringing (pirate) website, chooses to file a counter-claim.
There’s no denying the current process is rather unwieldy and somewhat broken, but when it comes to rights being at risk, I don’t believe Google has much to complain about. Sure it costs time and money to process the takedowns and remove offending search results–but isn’t that just the cost of doing business? There’s a price paid by those who create content–why should it be any different for those who profit by disseminating it?
It’s been a few months since Google announced a new initiative designed to lower search results for web-sites reported for piracy. According to Google, legitimate sites would move up and pirate sites would move down:
We aim to provide a great experience for our users and have developed over 200 signals to ensure our search algorithms deliver the best possible results. Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.
Since we re-booted our copyright removals over two years ago, we’ve been given much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online. In fact, we’re now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone. We will now be using this data as a signal in our search rankings.
At the time, Google’s announcement seemed encouraging, despite their careful use of the more flexible phrase “may appear lower” as opposed to “willappear lower.” Now that some time has passed, I thought I’d do a random search to see how well Google’s new algorithm is working to thwart piracy. I decided to do a fairly generic search using the terms “watch free movies online.” I did not specify a time frame or put the search terms in quotes. This was the result.
Result for search “watch free movies online”
The first two results were “sponsored results” (shaded in pink) which direct users to legitimate sites Yideo and Netflix. However, the top two non-sponsored sites are sites offering pirate links. I clicked “LetMeWatchThis” the second non-sponsored result. That took me to this landing page which entices users with an array of movie poster thumbnails from current releases (many haven’t even been released on DVD). I chose to click on a thumbnail for film that is scheduled to be released next week on December 4th, 2012–The Odd Life of Timothy Green.
Below a short summary of the film, there’s a list of 30 links to watch/download it. I did not examine each and every link, but aside from several “sponsored” links, most point to sites known to host pirated films.
Ignoring the first one (it’s a sponsored link that leads to an illegal pay-to-watch site) I clicked on the link to “Sockshare” a popular cyber-locker site (one of many to flourish in the vacuum left by Megaupload’s shutdown). After clicking the link, and navigating past an ad (remember these pirate sites are in the business of making money off stolen content) I arrived at an embedded, full stream of the film.
Remember, according to Google’s explanation of its new policy, “we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.” With this in mind, I decided to check Google’s “transparency report” to see how often this particular domain had been reported for copyright violations. According to these results, there had been more than 10,000 requests for the URL to be removed.
If these Alexa statistics are accurate, it’s safe to say that operating this particular pirate site is a lucrative endeavor indeed. It’s long been notorious for its illegal links. The fact this site comes up second in a Google search for to “watch free movies online” is certainly a factor in their robust income. Despite Google’s pledge to begin “using this (copyright infringement reporting) data as a signal” to adjust search rankings, their new algorithms don’t seem to be penalizing this site in the least. To the contrary, it seems this site is being rewarded with a plum ranking resulting in plump profits.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that, despite lip-service to the contrary, not much has changed when it comes to Google aiding and abetting websites that profit from piracy.
As an indie film and broadcast journalism veteran, I'll share my perspectives on issues of interest to the creative community and beyond--Ellen Seidler
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