Google’s foot dragging in fight against online piracy is in spotlight again.
In a piece published today in The Hill, “Google’s 100 Million Notices,” the RIAA’s Chairman and CEO Cary Sherman asks (again) why the Silicon Valley behemoth isn’t doing more to fight online piracy and police pirate links in search results:
In fact, when a user searches for virtually any prominent artist and song and “mp3,” the first result served up by Google’s own auto-complete function is usually mp3skull.com — a site that’s received more than two million music piracy notices and is among the top offenders on Google’s own public listing of sites receiving the most piracy notices. More broadly, rogue sites we analyzed managed to appear on page 1 of search results over 98% of the time in the searches we conducted.
What’s even more frustrating is that a significant portion of our piracy notices are repeat notices for the same song found on the same illicit site. So the enforcement system we operate under requires us to send a staggering number of piracy notices – 100 million and counting to Google alone—and an equally staggering number of takedowns Google must process. And yet pirated copies continue to proliferate and users are bombarded with search results to illegal sources over legal sources for the music they love.
It’s a question many of us have been asking Google for very a long time. Sherman offers up “five point plan” that Google could (and should) easily implement to mitigate its role as a gateway to illegal downloads online:
Our five-point plan is simple, straightforward and readily achievable by Google and others in search:
- fulfill the admirable promise to demote sites receiving extensive numbers of piracy notices
- make sure that the “take down” of a song is meaningful – not repopulated online two seconds later
- educate users by identifying authorized sites with a consumer-friendly “icon”
- stop leading users to illegal sites through autocomplete
- give your repeat offender policies some teeth
In reality Google’s so-called updates to its search algorithms (announced in August of 2012) have been (unsurprisingly) more “bark” than “bite.”
Take a look at the results I got today when I did a quick Google search for indie film “Kyss Mig” using the terms word “download” and the movie’s title. The first page of results chock full of illegal links and torrents on notorious pirate sites like Pirate Bay and Primewire.ag.
When it comes to piracy Google search functions a lot like Google maps–but instead of helping folks find the closest gas station it leads them straight to pirated movies, music and more. There’s really no excuse…