by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Piracy, Politics, Tech
Today my Twitter feed was filled with Tweets cheering Google’s new “doodle,” a rainbow flag festooned with various icons of athletes in action. Below it was a quote from the Olympic Charter:
“The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” –Olympic Charter
Sadly, while I am all for athletes and rainbow flags–and focusing attention on the fact that Russia is hosting the Olympics despite enacting abhorrent anti-gay legislation –Google makes me gag.
It’s not the message, but the messenger–a hypocrite to its very corporate core. If Google as a company truly believed in “human rights” why does it continue to disregard the rights of artists at every turn? Perhaps those who doodle for Google might want to review the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 27, paragraph 2) which includes this passage:
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Why is Google so keen on “fair play” and the rights of athletes to compete, but when it comes to artists, not so much?
Since we’re asking the question, perhaps we should also ask why Google doodles about non-discrimination at the Olympics but donates millions to ALEC, an organization actively working to deny Americans their right to vote?
For the record, recently discovered documents also reveal ALEC’s troubling anti-gay history, not surprising for a group known for its right-wing positions and affiliations.
For Google the Olympics controversy provides the company with yet another opportunity to leverage its (global) influence to gain positive reviews, this time by hijacking of the Olympic spirit.
The persecution of LGBT people in Russia is an outrage that deserves every bit of attention it’s received–but given the context and the company, today’s rainbow doodle comes off as a cynical public relations ploy by a company posturing to obscure a truly malevolent soul.
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Law, Piracy, Politics, Tech
Creativity ‘Continues to Thrive,’ in spite of SOPA’s defeat, not because of it
In a post marking the anniversary of SOPA’s defeat (Stop Online Piracy Act) Google asks users share a graphic to celebrate. “Since we combined our voices to stop SOPA, creativity has continued to thrive — both on and off the web.” Their celebratory note also includes this caveat:
Of course, piracy remains a major concern and Google does its part to fight it, but, two years after SOPA, it’s clear that the Internet has been really good for creativity and entertainment.
Frankly, I’ve never heard artists or entertainers make the argument that the internet isn’t “good” for creativity or entertainment. Yet, during the SOPA debate, as red herrings flew, content creators became the enemy in and us vs. them debate as hyperbolic and often mendacious rhetoric echoed across the web.
SOPA anniversary aside, this week marked another milestone– 100 Million takedown requests to remove search links to pirated music have been sent to Google. Note this total only includes takedown notices sent by the music industry. Don’t forget to add those millions sent to Google for pirated movies, photographs, books, and more.
If piracy is really a “major concern” for Google why do illegal sites still dominate in searches for music and movies? Here’s a graphic that is a tad more “balanced” than the one Google wants you to share.
Below is another graphic that worth considering when reading about Google’s rather disingenuous statements about their concerns re: online piracy. Yes, creativity continues to thrive online, but just image what could happen if Google actually took serious steps to stop supporting online piracy? It would be nice to see the trend lines in the chart below going down rather than steadily climb.
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Piracy, Tech
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…
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Piracy, Politics, Tech
As Google’s lobbying clout grows, so do its ties to right-wing political groups
A while back, in a post titled “The Web Ain’t Sherwood Forest–Except Maybe for the Mercatus Center, Koch Industries, A.L.E.C. and Google.” I criticized a newly released study by piracydata.org, a libertarian-sponsored website that used “splashy, but false, new data” designed to suggest that piracy is Hollywood’s fault. Turns out the site and the study was garbage, but in my piece I noted that Google’s fingerprints (and agenda) were all over the clunky propaganda effort.
It’s too bad that piracydata.org isn’t more transparent about its sugar daddy. Like many of the astro-turf anti-copyright entities this one’s tentacles can be traced back to Google, the supposedly aggrieved party whose persecution by anti-piracy advocates that inspired the site’s creation in the first place.
I also included the fact Google acknowledges its cozy relationship with the libertarian mission on its public policy page:
Our U.S. Public Policy and Government Affairs team provides support to a number of independent third-party organizations whose federally-focused work intersects in some way with technology and Internet policy. While this list is continually evolving, some examples of these organizations are: … Mercatus Center…
Yesterday Truth-Out.org published a great expose by Nick Surgey that sheds even more light on Google’s ties to right-wing political interests–interests that extend far beyond controlling the debate around copyright and content theft. The article, “The Googlization of the Far Right: Why Is Google Funding Grover Norquist, Heritage Action and ALEC? sheds more light on the fact that the Silicon Valley tech giant is underwriting a political agenda that in many ways parallels that of the notorious Koch brothers.
Organizations that received “substantial” funding from Google for the first time over the past year include Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Federalist Society, the American Conservative Union (best known for its CPAC conference), and the political arm of the Heritage Foundation that led the charge to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act: Heritage Action.
In 2013, Google also funded the corporate lobby group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, although that group is not listed as receiving “substantial” funding in the list published by Google.
Again, this information is not new, but it is important and deserving of ongoing scrutiny. Google’s lobbying budget in 2012 was 18.2 million dollars and the company now ranks number 8 in lobbyist spending among Washington’s influence peddlers. While Google (and Silicon Valley) have generally been associated with more “progressive” causes over the years, as Surgey points out , Google’s funding of ALEC is troubling:
There are many good reasons for brand conscious corporations to stay away from ALEC. For example, its legacy of Stand Your Ground gun laws and bills to make harder for Americans to vote, its work to repeal renewable energy laws and the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, and its efforts to privatize almost everything, are just a few of its extreme measures.
As each day passes and Google’s political influence grows, their corporate mantra “don’t be evil” seems increasingly mendacious and absurd. Perhaps the powers that be at Google should pick up some new bedtime reading. Grimm’s Fairy Tales might be a good choice. Why not begin by reading “Snow White” and note what happens to an evil queen who looks into the mirror and refuses to believe the truth?
by Ellen Seidler | Copyright, Film, Piracy, Politics
Google’s had a great week. On the heels of robust 3rd quarter revenue of 14.9 billion (net income of 2.97 billion), shares of its stock soared over the $1,000 mark for the first time in history making lots of folks in Mountain View (and investors everywhere) very happy. Yet while Google’s stock may have surged to new highs, it seems not much has changed when it comes to its anti-piracy priorities.
The tech titan has long been the target of anti-piracy activists like myself for its role in enabling and profiting from online piracy. The company’s culpabilities are many, but Google’s search engine has drawn much heat lately so it’s not surprising to see its flacks on the warpath fighting back spinning studies to counter that claim. In a recently published report “How Google Fights Piracy,” authors went so far as to claim that,“Google is a leader in rooting out and ejecting rogue sites from our advertising and payment services, and is raising standards across the industry.”
I dissected that report’s disingenuous findings in an earlier blog post, but after yesterday’s financial news, I decided to conduct a little piracy “reality check” and discovered not much has changed at Google other than its stock price.
I came to this not-unexpected conclusion this morning after doing three quick searches using the search term “watch ________ online” (filling in the blank with a movie title). As my first “test” search I chose a Hollywood blockbuster, The Hunger Games. I put “watch Hunger Games online” into search and up popped the results shown below.
The first result was a paid Netflix ad and the second listing is a largely a spam site. However, when I clicked on the third result I found the entire film streaming online (for free). FYI this pirate website, VIOOZ seems impervious to DMCA requests…at least I couldn’t find were to send a request and WHOIS database results were a dead-end. It should also be noted that VIOOZ.co seems to have supplanted VIOOZ.eu, the domain name change being yet another example online pirate entrepreneurs’ never-ending game of hide-and-go-seek.
My second search was for another hit movie, “Ted.” While not on the same the scale as “The Hunger Games,” the Seth MacFarlane directed film was a box office smash bringing in a record 54.1 million its first weekend, a record for an R-rated comedy. As for the Google search results, what’s interesting is that it brought be to a site, http://www.primewire.ag/ which appears to be yet another reincarnation of 1Channel.ch which became letmewatchthis.ch–a chameleon-like black market online piracy operation that makes money from ads on its site.
Like most pirate websites–the more clicks, the more money they make. The site boasts links to 53,695 items, and that’s a lot of carrots to drive traffic and dollars their way.
Note in the screen capture shown below, in the left margin there’s a “support this site” plea–below it, an advertisement promoting a CBS sports broadcast for NCAA college football. Sadly this is yet another example of a major American brand indirectly sending cash the pirate’s way.
Other ads pop up any time you click anything. At any rate when I clicked through the results for “Ted” I immediately came to a link for a pirated download on the pirate cyberlocker Sockshare.com.
Checking the Google transparency report for primewire.ag I found that Google has received requests to remove more than 4,000 results (links) the site became active this past June. Like the VIOOZ site, this pirate portal ignores DMCA requests. Particularly cheeky is the verbiage contained in the website’s “intellectual property” statement:
Intellectual Property – General
1Channel.ch respects the rights of others, and prohibits the use of referenced material for any purpose other than that for which it is intended (where such use is lawful and free of civil liability or other constraint) and in such circumstances where possession of such material may have any adverse financial, prejudicial or any other effect on any other third party.
1Channel.ch is copyrighted, and all rights are reserved, as those are of the proprietors and those of the partners websites material referenced within. Anyone found imitating the site or stealing content from the site will be liable to prosecution. [emphasis added]
My morning’s third search was for the recent indie film, “A Perfect Ending.” Using the same search criteria, the top result led me straight to a pirated stream of the full movie online at VIOOZ.
My results are, of course, anecdotal. However, given the fact that Google’s top results (using obvious search terms) led me straight to pirated copies of these movies, it would seem my findings undercut repeated claims by Google, and their paid surrogates, that search isn’t a significant factor in leading consumers to pirated content online.
The tech-funded Computer and Communication Industry Association’s (CCIA) Vice President of Law & Policy Matt Schruers recently authored a study that claimed, “Search Engines Aren’t A Major Tool For Finding Copyright-Infringing Content.” Oddly the actual link to the study has been taken offline, but its author made his thesis clear when he said:
The available evidence suggests that search engines are not a particularly relevant tool for finding copyright infringing sites, or for infringing sites to find users.
I would suggest that Mr. Shruers clarify what he meant by “available evidence?” The evidence I found via quick searches was readily “available,” and pretty damning.
As its stock continues to climb, there’s no denying that Google is a giant among giants–but with success comes responsibility. There is no magic bullet, but admitting one has a problem is the first step in finding a solution. For real progress to be made, Google needs to stop employing evasive maneuvers to deflect blame and begin to devote more of its vast resources and innovative technology to implement real solutions to the piracy problem that its search engine helps sustain. To do so would be in everyone’s best interests, consumers and creators alike.
Today my Twitter feed was filled with Tweets cheering Google’s new “doodle,” a rainbow flag festooned with various icons of athletes in action. Below it was a quote from the Olympic Charter:
