Google Caves To Hollywood Pressure: Will Now Punish Sites That Get Lots Of 'Valid' DMCA Notices
from the whose-master? dept
For quite some time the RIAA and MPAA have been going on and on about how Google can just "fix" its search results by either removing or punishing sites that are deemed as "pirate" sites. We've explained why this is not as easy as the entertainment industry thinks it is, but it appears that the pressure has gotten to Google... and they've just announced that they will, in fact, be punishing sites that they deem as bad players, based on the data they have of how many "valid copyright removal notices" a site gets: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.The company notes that it's just one signal of many and that they will only demote the results, but not remove those sites from the index. In fact, they point out, correctly, that "Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law."
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.
As I understand it, the plan is that for people who search for, say, "watch dark knight rises free online," Google will try to push results that are likely to be unauthorized down the list, and try to have more "authorized" results higher up in the list (though, with a search query like the one above, there may not be any "authorized results" that provide what the person is searching for).
It's that last point where this gets to be troubling. Part of the reason people are searching for such things is that there isn't an easy and legitimate way to get that content. The best result would be for Hollywood to get its act together, realize that its whole windowing procedure is a disaster from the consumers' perspective, and provide more of what consumers want. Instead, the end result is going to be that people do these searches and just get equally frustrated. I don't see how that's good for Hollywood or for Google.
My other concern is that things things that later turn out to be quite legitimate and massive opportunities for authorized and legitimate content, are quite frequently demonized as tools of piracy early on. Imagine an equivalent of this announcement today in the early days of the VCR, when the MPAA insisted that it was evil and infringing. Imagine if when you went into a store to buy a VCR, the store instead pointed you to the movie theater down the road. That might be what Hollywood thought it wanted, but the end result would have been a much smaller home movie market -- not a market that ended up being bigger than the box office market just a few years after Hollywood insisted it was illegal.
Same thing with the first MP3 players. The RIAA sued the Diamond Rio as being a tool for infringement. Imagine if when you went to buy an MP3 player, stores decided to instead tell you you should buy some cassette tapes instead. It enforces an older way of doing business, rather than a new way.
And this applies online as well. Obviously, there's still an ongoing lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement, and YouTube certainly gets a ton of "valid copyright removal notices." Would Google demote search results to YouTube based on this? In the past, Google has punished the search results for other parts of its own business, for violating its rules, so it's entirely possible that YouTube results could get demoted under this system -- though I would imagine that Google believes that the many other "signals" it uses to determine legitimacy would minimize the likelihood of this being an issue.
But... that might not apply to a new up and coming site. Take, for example, the cases of Veoh and MP3Tunes. What both of those companies did was deemed legal by the courts, but both companies went bankrupt due to massive legal fees from being sued by the legacy entertainment industry. Imagine if, on top of that, Google also demoted the results from those sites at the same time. Already, Google is facing antitrust scrutiny for what some companies claim was a policy that demoted Google search results to their pages. While I think those claims are pretty bogus, is Google just opening itself up to a similar antitrust attack on that point?
I recognize that Google has a tricky balancing act here -- trying to keep the entertainment industry off its back, and the governmental pressure that comes with that, while still providing the "best" search results for its users. And I'm sure that Google has tried to use an approach that minimizes the concerns I raise above. But we've already seen, quite clearly, how Google's automated systems often fail when it comes to copyright issues, and the risk for both abuse and bad results seems quite high. At the very least, it's going to bear very close scrutiny to see how Google handles legitimate sites, who get swept up in claims of infringement when they're actually providing legitimate services.
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Filed Under: abuse, copyright infringement, dmca notices, innovation, rankings, risks, search results
Companies: google, mpaa, riaa
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valid copyright removal notices
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Re: valid copyright removal notices
Buy & Support your local Art and Buy & Support the INDIE Art from elsewhere.
Boycott the MAFIAA !
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I'll make popcorn.
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Oh look now techdirt is one of those evil lyric sites! Downrank 'em boys!
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Let me be the DC to your AC
Kisses,
DC
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Google Caves To Hollywood Pressure: Will Now Punish Itself By Changing Its Core Service So That It No Longer Returns the Results Users are Seeking
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If Google thinks it gets a lot of noties now, just wait until this goes into effect.
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I added the shell corporation part in there, because the current track record shows that if a company files a bogus DMCA, they won't be penalized. Where I'm sure if a person filed a bogus DMCA, they'd be buried in lawsuits.
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What I don't get, is why a bogus DMCA takedown doesn't result in perjury charges?
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They can take all the tax dollars they want, as long as part gets funneled into their political flunkies' campaign funds. They just haven't needed to yet.
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Hollwood has:
1. Denial, of the loss of revenues and how they are alienating their customer base.
2. Anger, by blaming pirates. Lashing out at people with lawsuits.
3. Bargaining, (Where they currently are) with others to try to force people to continue to support their way of life.
So we're a little over halfway there... Just need them to go through Depression and then Acceptance that their business model is dead. =P
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"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."
This would mean they also have a way to identify invalid copyright removal notices.
So come on Google and share the love, how about restricting the notices from entities that rank high in the number of invalid copyright removal notices.
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I doubt that there will be any linearity to this. In order to be effective, I'll bet they'll sprinkle them through a number of pages and much deeper than page three. This will work pretty much like delisting with Google wearing a free speech fig leaf,
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The fact is that Google is moving into monetizing content even more directly and now has more reason to find the right balance. So now the infringing websites are still there except you might find one on page 47, another on page 202, etc. Most people don't go past the first few pages so this effectively delists those sites without Google having to answer to cries of censorship.
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If I thought it was EFFECTIVE then I wouldn't have an issue with it.
I will note, of course, that you didn't respond to a SINGLE issue I raised in the post about how this could cause significant collateral damage. But, then, you're in the business of *causing* significant collateral damage like this, so what do you care?
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Obviously, your friends at Google DO think it will be effective. And simply because YOU think there might be collateral damage doesn't mean there actually will be any, and certainly isn't justification to shelf a program designed to rein in people illegally monetizing the creative output of others.
This has to be a depressing development for you. First the payment processors got together and agreed to cut off rogue sites. Next, the ad networks adopted a best practices policy to cut these guys off. Then the ISP's join to implement six strikes. Now the apologists most formidable ally has agreed to bury infringers in their basement. The noose tightens and you and your fellow piracy apologists become more shill, more desperate and further on the margins of the debate.
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He denies it every time, but he can't unwrite history.
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Irrelevant troll post above.
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Mmmm that one's fortified with all the essential irony a kid needs to get through his day.
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This, ladies and gentlemen, is what is known as a truism. No pictures please - it's newborn and in a delicate state.
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It's not a "depressing development" for me. I think that Google and Hollywood are making a big *mistake* here, because this won't help things, and could cause collateral damage. There are ways to deal with infringement, and this isn't it.
Also, you're the first person to accuse us of carrying Google's water all the time. Yet, now when this proves that's total bullshit, you forget all those old claims and now pretend that we're somehow "marginalized." Reminds me of your predictions about how SOPA was going to sail through....
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Finally, your way of dealing with infringement is to ignore enforcement entirely. While I agree that new business models are necessary and actually in process, ignoring people who monetize the copyrighted content of others should not be tolerated, and by the look of things- will not be.
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You know who does hold the most sway? The paying customer! If you think back-room industry deals are going to endear customers to these companies you're out of your frickin' mind. The process that sunk SOPA will be equally effective at dealing with companies trying to secretly screw over the very people that are their income source.
"Finally, your way of dealing with infringement is to ignore enforcement entirely."
Correction, the way to deal with infringement is to ignore enforcement entirely and concentrate on meeting your customers demands instead.
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about it. It was a massive failure pretty much proving the worlds addiction to the content they produce. Though I think Gorehound did participate.
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Which by the way it is being a tremendous success according to the labels own statements people halved the size of that industry by half.
Keep up the good work people another decade an that industry could be 1/4 of the apice, which could be accelerated by the creation of free open alternatives.
Piracy is slowing down, and the labels still don't get money, that should tell you something about what is happening.
People are just turning their backs to "musicians" and they will do the same thing to movies at some point if idiots keep pushing it.
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I have to ask the obvious question though Mike:
If you don't want to deal with the ignorant people you call the "legacy industry" (like it's going away) why does it matter what Google does about their DMCA complaints?
If sites are pushing new artists, with all the legal rights to have their content on their sites, the stupid legacy players can't do a thing.
My thought? You are not thrilled because you understand that this greatly undermines the piracy systems, which in turn may hurt of some your "new business models" which hinge either on using the piracy infrastructure, or that depend on the stupid legacy players getting dragged into financial ruin by piracy.
Otherwise, can your new business models truly compete? Or are we looking at a collection of sideshows, with perhaps a lottery ticket winner's chance of turning into a long term business?
If the legacy industry is making such big mistakes, they will fade away even more quickly if you let them. I think you are upset because you realize this sort of thing tips the balance against your desired outcome, and perhaps is another indication that the tide of piracy is already slowly going back out.
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I have scary news for you. "Pirates" will "pirate", and they don't use Google to do it. If their favorite site goes down, they move to one of the other 50 that they already know about. They don't need Google to point them.
This will ultimately mean nothing, and that's the ultimate take-away from this. Once again, the "Content Industry" does something that doesn't address the issue while clinging to their "business model" and refusing to even consider change.
Yes, I understand that people getting content for free sucks. People should be paid for their work. I haven't seen anyone here argue against that, despite your claims to the contrary. What people ARE saying is that, if the market shows you, point blank, what they want, you're a fool to ignore it. A wise and savvy businessperson will look at it and think "What can I do to capitalize on that?". Instead, you think "How can I squash that behavior?".
In other words, for the love of Pete, INNOVATE!
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... and simply because YOU think there might be collateral damage doesn't mean there actually will be any"
So you agree with Mike that it's likely, not because he says so but because YOU say so. You actually put it more strongly than he does - aggrieved sites will be consigned to oblivion and will have, at best, recourse. That is a chilling paragraph, my friend.
For the record, I don't agree with you. Sites won't be consigned to oblivion. But I disagree slightly with Mike too, because this kind of ordering does improve the search experience for certain types of users. In the future, search engines and their prejudices will be marketed like any other product.
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Why do you like systems that are ripe for abuse?
> The system is based on the DMCA notice and
> counter-notice system.
Yes, a system that has been abused so much.
I wouldn't mind the DMCA if the penalty for getting it wrong had some serious teeth in it.
I'll just add, I would be happy to see piracy completely disappear. Yes, really.
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That's easy: abolish copyright/IP, bang, no more pirates.
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And the system most ripe for abuse is the one where the intellectual property of others is ripe for the taking with little effective legal recourse. That has given rise to the industry agreements which will end up making you wish you had SOPA instead. At least there was judicial oversight. Now you will be relying on the benevolence of the private sector. Good luck with that.
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Oh do grow up and grow a pair. And finally admit that piracy has always happened, will always happen, and the most important thing is learning to adapt to it. Because the march of technology will go on, and people will expect more and more that the legacy industries are consistently failing to deliver.
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"once again" doesn't even apply here
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YATP (Yet Another Troll Post).
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As someone who has had to rank about 1200 sites in my day. I can tell you assuredly that his is not going to do shit.
Google lowers the ranking of shady sites so more legit sites can rise to the top? Ok then, so free streaming site ranks for x search query. If hollywood does not provide legit options, there is nothing to be ranked about the so called rouge sites and nothing changes across what folks are searching for in the first place.
Cream rises to the top, shit sinks to the bottom.
Nigel
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too much coffee today.
N.
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This is not a reasonable measure.
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It immediately vaporizes all his goofy economic theories.
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There. I fixed it for you.
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Irrelevant troll post above.
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What about the next search company?
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Re: What about the next search company?
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Spread the love
*And any other search engines besides google.
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because these chumps are not "OPEN" nor "Do No Evil"
its bad enough they are censoring your search results
and scanning all your emails to better sell you advertising
#Googblows
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Now, this may not be true of vendor specific phones but I can find phones where this holds true.
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Often any time they are not 'open' it is to concede to other companies so that they can work together. Do you remember cell phone games when they were completely run by carriers? Yeah, those carriers haven't changed their ideals one bit, they just merely have to comply to giving up any control to compete properly, but they fight 'open' every chance they have.
Do you really think Google would prefer to 'censor' results if they were able to maintain all their legal protections while returning results based solely on their algorithms? Who would make work harder for themselves for no benefit whatsoever?
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Sometimes the devil you know is better, and I've always felt this way about Google. I'm by no means happy with a lot of what they do, but it's typically better than the alternatives.
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Why? I don't have to use any Google services or be tracked by Google to use my android phone.
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I wish they would define what they mean by "valid copyright removal notices". That is a pretty vague phrase -- it could mean removal notices about actual copyright infringement (which it can't mean, as even Google admits that they can't tell if something is really infringing or not), or that the webform for the removal request was completely filled in, or -- as I suspect -- removal notices that resulted in Google removing something.
In any case, Google is become less relevant with every passing year.
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This. Right here. What the hell.
This homeless guy says you stole his house, and his car, and his clothes, and his food, and his dog. Please return all these things to him immediately. Investigate? What? No, of course not. He says you did, that's good enough for us.
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In other words, they would eliminate everything that is good about the internet.
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AKA: YouTube + Content ID.
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Quick - a mole!
Whack.
Whack. Whack.
Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.
Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.
... etc. ...
Hopefully, you get the picture.
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Punish ALL(?) the guilty?
I'm holding my breath for that.
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Re: Punish ALL(?) the guilty?
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Re: Punish ALL(?) the guilty?
If some Anonymous-type group wanted to, they could probably impose a total blackout of YouTube and get away with it.
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A browser plugin
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Once again...
Demanding that others to solve your problems for you out of charity is just insane. This is their problem, not Google's, not Yahoo's, not your ISP's, it's Hollywood's problem and no one else's. They should bear the cost if they want to combat this "problem".
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So you are suggesting that players in the ecosystem have no responsibility to guard against illegal activity? Bullshit. Banks, S&L's, Credit Unions, brokerages and other financial institution are all on the front line against money laundering and other crimes. UPS and FedEx all bear some of the costs of preventing drugs, weapons and contraband from moving through the delivery ecosystem.
So once again, you have embarrassingly proven that you are full of shit.
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Banks, .... brokerages and other financial institution are all on the front line against money laundering and other crimes."
aahahaha - LMFAO - good one !
oh, wait ... you're serious :/
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The players in the ecosystem have no responsibility to protect the interests of other industries.
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You are a nutjob.
Why are you even on this site? Are you just here to yell "babykiller" at the abortion clinic? We get it. You think certain types of data distribution are CRIMES and WRONG. Adults have a range of opinions on the topic. The person you're responding to doesn't think pirated uploads are as serious as you do. The existence of this difference of perspective should not be a shock to you, and it alone does not make him "full of shit."
Are you one of these people who believes that grown men and women don't have the right to have differences of opinion on law and conscience? If you believe something, everybody else must believe it too or you will beat them until they see things your way?
Or maybe you just assumed that he, like you, is driven to psychotic rage by minor civil infractions, so for him to not immediately recognize the equivalency of laundering drug money and filtering search results based on alleged minor copyright issues only means that he did not think things through?
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Google does not have a direct stake in fighting infringement. They are providing a service to the **AA that they aren't really mandated to; and were this anyone else demanding Google provide a service that doesn't benefit Google in any way to provide it, and would actually cost them money, Google would likely tell them to get stuffed.
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Oh...wait, you're the guy who is just here to harp on Masnick with carefully worded ad hominem attacks. it must be nice to sling insults instead of back up your statements, right?
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Meanwhile, somewhere inside Google:
Gflack 2: Just keep recording them searches and keep whacking! We'll be the only ones to know the real demand when we do buy them! Mwah hah hah hah hah!!!!
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I'm confused…
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Re: I'm confused…
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Yeah, great example. They can't get an easy and legitimate copy of a movie that hasn't been release on DVD yet. How nice.
Why don't you just tell Ford they need to deliver your 2016 car today too. The design is done, so you should be able to get it easily and legitimately now.
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Which is why they search for other means of acquiring them.
The 2016 example, per your own stupidity, wouldn't work because A. the 2013 models aren't even being shipped yet and B. they still need to manufacture the vehicle from scratch.
You trolls really suck with analogies.
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False limits lead to creative ways around problems. Is someone 'breaking the law' by getting their Nebraskan cousin to purchase that Prius? Or is it just another element of the 'free' market?
Sometimes I wish Ayn Rand were around to go and beat the content industries around the head. Because that would be the only use for her asinine and inhuman economic philosphy.
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Exactly! They should be able to get a legitimate copy on DVD on the day the movie is released. They should be able to watch a legitimate stream or legitimate download on the day the movie is released. They should be able to, because the technology allows it and the customers want it. But the old-fasioned, backwards-looking content industries want to keep pretending it's 1995, and base their release schedules, distribution methods and pricing on technological and physical restrictions that simply don't exist anymore, and then get all upset when people don't respect these non-existent restrictions. What a great long-term strategy!
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Nice.
Tell us, Google. Do you really think we're wanting DVD stores when searching for streaming?
I think it's time to part ways with Google.
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It'll return No pages found that match your search criteria.
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A difficult balancing act; the "we'll bleed you dry through legal fees" ex-gatekeepers on one hand, a fickle public with inevitable alternatives on the other.
For Google's sake, I sincerely hope they're merely trying to stave off the MAFIAA temporarily while secretly working on a way to deal with them permanently. Google will never be able to please them; they're not complaining about "rights", they're trying to eliminate competition. And they will never try to compete fairly.
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People keep saying ContentID and now NoGoogleForAnyone are about money being diverted or "stolen by pirates", but the numbers just don't add up.
The reality of ContentID is automatic assignment of ownership rights to approved corporate entities. Essentially, this locks out the Internet as a distribution system for individual producers, innovators or business-people.
There's more to this madness than a few small-time greedy twits whose own ignorance caps their industry's profit potential.
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Prediction
Now the copyright owners can't find any piracy in Google, and so they will be content to believe that piracy doesn't exist. Just as there was no unauthorized drinking during prohibition.
Hollywood will win the war on piracy just like the US is winning the War on (some) Drugs.
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Re: Prediction
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I would be totally okay with this...
Seems like a fair trade to me, especially as they always seem to insist that they always research and make absolutely sure never to issue bogus DMCA claims.
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Re: I would be totally okay with this...
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Re: Re: I would be totally okay with this...
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Instead of trying to solve that problem, Google spend their resource on this to manipulate results and appease to MPAA/RIAA/**AAs. This makes Google searches even less impartial, skewed and potentially much less useful.
I can't think of a better way to destroy yourself by messing with what customer perceives and wants. Sure, since they are a big company and since their user base is so large, it will take some time before noticeable decline in search. But I believe it will eventually come if they continue this path.
Not that I particular like Microsoft or something, but I heard Bing's search are getting better. Perhaps I should start testing searches with it.
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Google is making a huge mistake.
If you're going to be a search engine, than do so. The minute people believe there's something you can't find with Google, it loses its entire purpose.
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DMCA - Digital Mafiaa Censorship of America
Anyway I can foresee...
1. 1st and 2nd search result pages become boiler-plate same websites listed everytime. Innocent search terms by people doing research for non-music, non-movie related topics e.g. "torrents of water" results 1-10 = Simon & Garfunkel official website... Buy Deep Purple album from Warner today etc... causing annoyed users to flock elsewhere or learn to click thru the first couple of pages.
2. Search competitors rising and capitalising on this self-imposed performance degradation.
3. SEO methodology switches to getting your website to appear at the top of page 3...n as the first couple of pages become meaningless.
4. Bit players in search and SEO are going to begin 'craigslisting' by building websites that filter Google search results to get rid of all the first page junk, or curate the salted results to get what you want (Google play whackamole with them).
5. Google search slowly declines... Mafiaa move on too persecuting the next new tech (holovids?) Google finally fix their broken search in an attempt to catch up with the competition that passed them, but loss of goodwill and perception of being 'the search engine only your parents use' will plague them, they never recover.
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That is just marvelous.
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Now here is where the problem lies even though perjury is illegal when it comes to the DCMA and Hollywood they don't give two shits if the DCMA request was illegal or not.
If Google wants to do this I guess it could be good but on the other side the courts need to start handing out punishments for false DCMA takedown request.
If they do not do this I'm sure this method is going to be abused to the max.
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When the time comes that another search engine gives better results than you, I'll drop you for them in a heartbeat.
Consider yourself warned.
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Google lost its roots and the field is once again wide open for sites like duckduckgo to become the next success story.
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Could it be...
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Google wants to sell entertainment...
Why is Google caving? Because they want to compete with Apple and others, and this is the price that the content creators insisted upon.
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Re: Google wants to sell entertainment...
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Why not explain how we are all 'staggeringly entitled' for wanting the banks not to be run by bandits? They at least run a useful, relevant and evolving service...
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It's not even in the first 10 pages of results (no idea if it appears later or not).
It's the first result in Bing.
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A modest proposal
Google should not just downrank them, but really seriously downrank them practically into non-existence. Now if you search for something like the name of a song or movie, the authorized versions would appear at the top of the very first page. Yea!
The non-authorized versions would appear at the bottom of the very last page. Just click the "last" page button to get to the end of the list of 158,390,194 zillion search results. As you can see, by downranking the non-authorized sites, they will become impossible to find. :-)
Problem solved. Everyone happy.
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Re: A modest proposal
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'nuf said.
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Google search??
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