Google’s downranking of pirate sites is a big, fat, LIE

Google’s promise to fight piracy on its search engine is pure baloney

I was updating my film’s website earlier this week and so randomly went to Google to see where it would show up in search results.  I figured that, given it’s the official website for the film, it would be at or near the top of the results. Boy was I wrong…When I used in the search terms And Then Came Lola website the first result was a pirate site offering pirated streams of the film with a single click. In fact, the actual website for our film was nowhere to be found.  Instead the first page of results included several sites that featured pirated streams of our film.

Yeah Google, you’re surely doing everything you can to fight online piracy aren’t you?

I guess it’s time to visit that handy dandy DMCA online takedown form that Google–so graciously–makes creators whose work is stolen use.  Of course, in order to get to the DMCA page, one must click through 7 pages of crap, then login to Google, before–at last– filling out a tedious online form,  It would, of course, be much more efficient to send an email (since I already have DMCA template set up) but let’s face it, Google has NO desire (nor incentive) to make the process an easy one.

In the meantime, maybe the good folks at Google responsible for fine-tuning search algorithms to downgrade pirate sites in search results need to go back to the drawing board.  Remember this B.S?

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

Google search results not only put a pirate result in first place, but at the bottom of the page offer these handy suggested search phrases that also offer ways find illegal streams or downloads of my film.

BTW the pirate site solarmovie (and its ever-changing cornucopia of domain suffixes) that pops up #1 IS a notorious pirate host, impervious to any direct DMCA requests. It’s been reported thousands of times to Google….Why does it still end up as a #1 result???  If this is punishing pirate sites one can only wonder what praising them would look like?

Google’s search DMCA takedown process is a joke

Of course, even after I go to ALL the trouble of requesting that Google remove the links it won’t disappear. In a nifty sleight of hand the Google team will simply move it to Chilling Effects so that users can still easily find the pirated stream(s) online. This entire DMCA takedown scheme is a fraud makes a mockery of the DMCA and destroys creators’ ability to protect their work from online theft.  Recently the USPTO organized a working group comprised creators and service providers to address inefficiencies in the DMCA takedown process.  This past Tuesday the group released its findings in a document, “DMCA Notice-and-Takedown Processes”.   While it could be considered progress that the various parties are talking, there’s still plenty of evidence that the DMCA is badly the broken and due for a major overhaul.

Here’s a sneak peek of Part II of this (never-ending) story illustrating how Google’s search suggestions, mentioned above, also point directly to stolen (pirated) copies of my movie.