by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Google, Law, Piracy, Politics, Tech
Censorship is a dirty word, laden with negative connotations and so it’s not surprising to see the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) dust if off (again) for use in its ongoing PR efforts to undermine rights of creators who use legal means to protect their works from online theft. The “censoring speech online” hyperbole was an effective battle cry during the SOPA debate, so why not use the same rhetoric to gin up opposition to artists’ rights and copyright law?
This time EFF’s sites are set on the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the law (passed in 1998) that set up a system whereby copyright holders could facilitate the removal of their pirated content from websites that publish it without authorization. Yesterday Maira Sutton launched a salvo on the EFF blog ominously titled, Copyright Law as a Tool for State Censorship of the Internet. Sutton warns:
The DMCA has become a global tool for censorship, precisely because it was designed to facilitate the removal of online media…
Per usual, her post is written as though online piracy is a benign, practically non-existent problem. In fact, not once does she address the ways in which copyright infringement damages damages filmmakers, authors, musicians, photographers and other creators. Don’t people working in these fields deserve protection too? Apparently not, at least as far as the EFF is concerned.
In EFF’s world, copyright itself is a a form of censorship
Conveniently ignoring the scourge of online piracy, Sutton expresses alarm that various nations around the world are using the DMCA as a template managing copyright infringement on the web. She calls it “state-mandated internet censorship” and warns of “harsher” copyright enforcement. Harsher relative to what? At the moment, many countries do very little to enforce copyright law online so use of the term seems a tad hyperbolic. Perhaps a worldwide standardization of copyright infringement protection law might be good practice for an online eco-system that has essentially become border-free.
Sutton lists 9 instances in which content was removed for allegedly political reasons via a DMCA notice. Not to minimize any wrongdoing in these particular instances, but has Ms. Sutton bothered to examine the millions of legitimate removals that occur each week worldwide? In any enforcement system there exist errors and potential for abuse, but the the truth is that the volume of legit DMCA notices far outweighs illegitimate ones.
No system is perfect. I’ve long been critical of the DMCA, though not for the reasons Ms. Sutton cites. In my experience, the intent of the “safe harbor” provision of the law is routinely sidestepped as tech companies (like EFF funder Google) continue to reap billions from unauthorized online content theft.
From a creator’s perspective the DMCA is clumsy and ultimately weighted against rights holders. Go ahead and upload a movie to YouTube. Yeah, there’s fine print under “suggestions” that politely asks, “Please be sure not to violate others’ copyright or privacy rights,” but users don’t actually have to submit any proof of ownership. It’s the job of rights holders to search for, and submit a DMCA notice to request the removal of their content day after day after day.
If an uploader responds with a counter-notice, it’s the rights holder who has to go to court to enforce a takedown. Most indie creators don’t have the money to initiate a lawsuit so in many cases it’s the uploader that–in this game–gets the last word as the content ends up back online. The default mode for YouTube and the rest of the web is “go for it.” In the end, the DMCA is all we have to fight back.
EFF’s own Chilling Effects provides an efficient search engine to find pirated links online
Ms. Sutton also asks for more transparency in the process. Fine by me as long as it doesn’t include operating a “database” that serves as a de facto search engine for pirated content like the EFF’s own Chilling Effects. Using their database of DMCA takedown notices (sent to Google and a few others) it’s easy to find direct links to pirated content around the globe. This sort of transparency is really just playing a shell game with pirate links. Remove pirate links from Google and they receive new life, and traffic, via Chilling Effects.
Of course Ms. Sutton doesn’t mention this fact, nor does she address how Chilling Effects’ republishing of reported links in their entirety is essentially an F-You to all the creators–like me–who are working within the confines of established law to protect our creative work from profiteers. The Chilling Effects database could easily provide transparency while redacting a portion of the pirate links, but its apologists choose not to. That’s not transparency, that’s facilitating theft. Apparently that’s A-OK in their book.
Speaking of “transparency,” it’s worth pointing out that Ms. Sutton also conveniently fails to acknowledge her organization’s own ties to the tech industry, entities that would have a vested interest in seeing the DMCA gutted. Her omission undermines any credibility she may have in terms of her overall arguments. Until she, and those she represents are willing to be transparent about their funding sources, and how this money influences their mission, how can we take her complaints seriously?
Censorship is a word that goes both ways. Clearly, when it comes to political speech it’s not a good thing, but neither is a system, seemingly supported by the EFF, where online piracy is allowed to run rampant. When the livelihoods of creative artists are undermined, their rights are, in fact, being suppressed.
The world exists in shades of gray, but in the EFF’s, it’s black and white–a world where censorship and copyright are considered synonyms.
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Film, Piracy, TV
WheretoWatch.com offers convenient way to find movies and TV shows
Some good news for those trying for figure out where to find their favorite movies or television shows online. Today the MPAA announced the launch of wheretowatch.com, a new site that makes searching for movies and TV shows easy.
Even better, the site isn’t limited to Hollywood fare. Its search engine offers links to streaming sites featuring a variety of independent films. In fact, when I searched for a movie I co-produced/directed, the niche lesbian comedy And Then Came Lola, I happily found 7 different options for renting and/or purchasing it. Wheretowatch.com is great news for indie filmmakers hoping to publicize their offerings.
Of course it also helps in the ongoing battle against online piracy. For $1.99 you can watch a movie. After all, it’s cheaper–and lasts longer–than a cup of coffee from Starbucks.
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Film, Google, Law, Piracy
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?
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Google, Law, Tech
Google removes pirate links, Chilling Effects reposts them
In the wake of Google’s move to allegedly downgrade search results linking to notorious pirate websites, it’s worth looking at another de facto search engine, closely linked to Google, that so far seems impervious to calls for change. In many ways it renders Google’s removal of reported infringing links, moot. The “search engine” I’m referring to is none other than Chilling Effects, a Google supported DMCA database operated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) and a consortium of law clinics.
This database archiving DMCA takedown notices reported to Google (and a few other service providers) was supposedly created to provide “transparency” for the DMCA process, but unfortunately it’s also gained a reputation for being used as a de facto cudgel by service providers like Google to dissuade rights holders sending takedown notices. After all, before one sends a takedown notice to Google one must acknowledge this warning:
Please note that a copy of each legal notice we receive is sent to a third-party which may publish and annotate it (with your personal information removed). As such, the content submitted in this form will be forwarded to Chilling Effects (http://www.chillingeffects.org) for publication…For products like Google Web Search, a link to your published notice will be displayed in Google’s search results in place of the removed content.
Using Chilling Effects to find pirated music and movies is easier than using Google search
What’s even more troubling is the content of the database itself. Yes, Google might reluctantly remove a pirate link from search results, but the infringing link lives on–conveniently available via Chilling Effects. In effect, the database acts a shadow site for pirate links removed from Google search. Using Chilling Effects to search for pirated movies and music is actually easier that using Google. Using Google, one has to search through various results in order to actually find valid links. Meanwhile, search results on Chilling Effects provide results that offer infringing links in a convenient, clean lists. Great for would-be thieves–not so great for content creators.
This morning, using the Chilling Effects database search engine, I was able to quickly find active pirated streams for the recently released movie, Dracula Untold*. All I had to do was type in the title, click my mouse, and choose a link from the DMCA notices that popped up in the results. I chose to use a DMCA notice sent to Google by NBC Universal that reported 762 infringing links. See the graphic below to see how just how simple it was.
Chilling Effects’ refusal to redact the actual infringing links included in DMCA notices has long been a source of contention. Now, however, it seems that some clever piracy entrepreneurs have taken it to a new, efficient extreme by creating a search engine that can leverage links reported via DMCA notices stored by Chilling Effects to provide users with access to pirated movies and music.
According to TorrentFreak a site called FileSoup offers both a search engine for (removed) torrent links, but has also developed new technology dubbed Necromancer that according to claims, will crawl the Chilling Effects database and Google’s own transparency report for DMCA notices it has received:
The operators of FileSoup also addressed indirect search engine takedowns. Every week rightsholders force Google to remove torrent listings from its search results. For this problem FileSoup says it has a solution, and a controversial one it is too.
The team behind the site say they have developed a web crawler designed to pull the details of content subjected to DMCA notices from two sources – Google’s Transparency Report and the Chilling Effects Clearing House. From here the links are brought back to life.
“We created a technology that crawls DMCA notices and resurrects the torrent webpage under a different URL so it can appear in search results again. It was rather complicated to sharpen it, but eventually it works pretty well. We will use it on FileSoup.com for all the websites we proxy,” FileSoup explain.
Meanwhile, according to its website, Chilling Effects claims to be performing a public service:
Our goals are to educate the public, to facilitate research about the different kinds of complaints and requests for removal–both legitimate and questionable–that are being sent to Internet publishers and service providers, and to provide as much transparency as possible about the “ecology” of such notices, in terms of who is sending them and why, and to what effect.
While its purported goals may appear laudable, one has to ask, why is it that an organization (run by a consortium of law school “clinics” and the Google-funded Electronic Frontier Foundation) can’t achieve its objective without also serving as backup source to find pirated content?
With Chilling Effects acting as a repository for pirate links removed from Google, what options do rights holders have now? We dutifully send DMCA notices to Google to protect our work from thieves, only to find our efforts are really an exercise in futility thanks to Chilling Effects? Are we supposed to send takedown notices to Chilling Effects to take down the very links we asked Google to remove in the first place? If we send a DMCA notice to Chilling Effects is it archived in the database too? Ultimately, Chilling Effects is really just a fun-house hall of mirrors where online thieves have the last laugh.
In crafting the DMCA, is this what lawmakers had in mind when they carved out a “safe harbor” provision? Does the Chilling Effects database really protect innovation online? At the moment, the site’s chief role seems to be as a resource for those who want to rip off creators. Chilling Effects is not working in the public’s interest, it’s working in the pirate’s.
*For the record, this is how I conducted my search using Chilling Effects database:
- Reviewed Rotten Tomatoes to find a current/popular film title.
- Went to Chilling Effects and entered film’s title (Dracula Untold) into search.
- Clicked randomly one of the first results in those infringing links listed.
- The DMCA notice I clicked on happened to be from NBCUniversal (to Google) and included 700+ links. I selected one near the top and it took me to a full stream of the film online.
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Google, Piracy
Are Google claims that search isn’t a path to piracy about to bite the dust?
Headlines scream, “Google’s Search Changes Are Reportedly Destroying Top Pirate Sites!” and “Google’s New Search Downranking Hits Torrent Sites Hard.” Oh my gosh, can it be true? Does removing pirate links in search results really make a difference? Has traffic to pirate sites plummeted now that their infringing content is harder to find?
What about Google’s oft-repeated claim that its search engine does not drive traffic to pirate websites? Will Google apologists admit it–was Google wrong all this time? Just last week in an update to its report How Google Fights Piracy this assertion was repeated:
1. Search is not a major driver of traffic to pirate sites. [emphasis added] Google Search is not how music, movie, and TV fans intent on pirating media find pirate sites. All traffic from major search engines (Yahoo, Bing, and Google combined) accounts for less than 16% of traffic to sites like The Pirate Bay.17 In fact, several notorious sites have said publicly that they don’t need search engines, as their users find them through social networks, word of mouth, and other mechanisms.18 Research that Google co-sponsored with PRS for Music in the UK further confirmed that traffic from search engines is not what keeps these sites in business.19 These findings were confirmed in a recent research paper published by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.20
The “research paper” cited in the above quote, “The Search Fixation: Infringement, Search Results, and Online Content” also highlights the same claim:
The contention that disappearing undesirable entries from search results would substantially prevent piracy is flawed, however. The solutions to online infringement have little to do with search.
The study supposedly had stats to back this up:
Traffic statistics in 2011 indicated that a mere 15% of traffic to alleged “rogue sites” was referred by search…Evidence suggests that sites associated infringement receive relatively little traffic from search.
So what’s the truth? Has precipitous drop in traffic to pirates sites following Google’s downgrade shown, once and for all, that Google flacks were full of hot air? The answer to that question seems clear.
While this drop in traffic to sites like Kickass.to is welcome, unfortunately it doesn’t mean that pirate links have disappeared from Google search, not at all.
Well-known Pirate sites have been replaced in Google search by lesser known ones
The most notorious pirate sites may have disappeared from top results, but unfortunately they’ve been replaced by lesser known sites peddling the same stolen content. I wrote about this last week and TorrentFreak noticed the same trend:
A search for “Breaking Bad torrent” previously featured Kickass.to, Torrentz.eu and Isohunt.com on top, but these have all disappeared. Interestingly, in some cases their place has been taken by other less popular torrent sites.
Bottom line, it’s progress against the scourge of online piracy, but more work needs to be done by Google and other search engines.
by Ellen Seidler | Ad Sponsored Piracy, Copyright, Film, Google, Law, Piracy
Google’s anti-piracy pledge fails to pass muster
Yesterday I wrote a blog post expressing skepticism about the promises made in Google’s latest update to its self-serving “How Google Fights Piracy” report. The report made headlines thanks to word that Google finally appears ready to move against the plethora of pirate links found via its search engine. In its report Google made this claim:
In October 2014, we have improved and refined the DMCA demotion signal in search results, increasing the effectiveness of just one tool rights holders have at their disposal…
In addition to removing pages from search results when notified by copyright owners,Google also factors in the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site as one signal among the hundreds that we take into account when ranking search results. Consequently, sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results. This ranking change helps users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.
Well, it’s October of 2014–October 21st to be exact–and this morning I used Google search to check out how things are going with its new “demotion” algorithm for search. I chose to look for Gone Girl, a movie that was released earlier this month and is still screening in theaters. Using the search terms: “gone girl” watch free online it literally took me a couple seconds to find a a link to an active copy of the film streaming online listed on page one of Google search’s results.
What’s the threshold for Google’s “new” algorithm to work its magic and demote results for this pirate website? It’s worth noting that Google is careful to insert the equivocation “may” into its promise that “Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results.” [emphasis added]
Given the number of complaints, one has to ask the question why is this site even allowed to remain listed Google search results at all? In its report Google provides this dubious explanation as to why only links are removed rather than ban entire site:
While we use the number of valid copyright removal notices as a signal for ranking purposes,we do not remove pages from results unless we receive a specific removal request for the page. Even for the websites that have received the highest numbers of notices, the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site. It would be inappropriate to remove entire sites under these circumstances. [emphasis added]
I challenge anyone to find a single page on watch32.com that offers up anything besides infringing links? This website’s ONLY function is to make money by offering up pirate links to popular movies. There’s nothing legitimate about it and there would be nothing “inappropriate” about removing the ENTIRE SITE.
Google’s report also tries to rebut charges that it’s a popular and convenient way for people to find free (pirated) content making the claim that more people search for “Katy Perry” than search for “Katy Perry free.” So what? No one is saying that the majority of searches on Google aren’t legit. What we are complaining about is the fact that sites like watch32.com are still show up in Google’s search results. It’s like a store selling merchandise and pointing out that only one aisle offers stolen goods. There’s no excuse. The fact is that by including criminal sites like these in its results Google is aiding and abetting the pirate economy.
As I noted yesterday, there is good reason to be skeptical of Google’s shiny new piracy report. The company’s record speaks for itself. Actions speak louder than words, and so far Google’s bark against pirates is much bigger than its bite.
Update 10-30-14: Traffic to some major pirate/torrent sites has reportedly been diminished post-algorithm change. I’ve written about that development here, but fact is there are still pirate sites to be found in first page of search results on Google.
Censorship is a dirty word, laden with negative connotations and so it’s not surprising to see the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) dust if off (again) for use in its ongoing PR efforts to undermine rights of creators who use legal means to protect their works from online theft. The “censoring speech online” hyperbole was an effective battle cry during the SOPA debate, so why not use the same rhetoric to gin up opposition to artists’ rights and copyright law?
Ms. Sutton also asks for more transparency in the process. Fine by me as long as it doesn’t include operating a “database” that serves as a de facto search engine for pirated content like the EFF’s own Chilling Effects. Using their database of DMCA takedown notices (sent to Google and a few others) it’s easy to find direct links to pirated content around the globe. This sort of transparency is really just playing a shell game with pirate links. Remove pirate links from Google and they receive new life, and traffic, via Chilling Effects.
