Google Issues Its Latest 'Stop Blaming Us For Piracy' Report

from the target-on-its-back dept

Google is big and successful. Some legacy entertainment companies have been struggling. For whatever reason, many of those companies have decided that Google's success must be the reason for their downfall, and they've been blaming Google ever since. It's pervasive and it's deeply ingrained. A few years ago, I ended up at a dinner with a recording industry exec (and RIAA board member) who was so absolutely positive that Google was deliberately trying to destroy his business that it was reaching delusional levels. Of course, these legacy players have been banging on this drum for so long that they've convinced some others that it must be true, including some content creators and politicians. They all believe that the correlation of Google's success and their own struggles must be about Google, and not their own failures to innovate. And their number one argument seems to be (ridiculously) that Google "profits" from piracy and therefore Google encourages piracy.

As this drumbeat has gotten louder and louder, Google has felt the need to respond. The company has, for many years, actually done plenty to try to stop piracy, rather than encourage it, and it's reached the point where Google is (stupidly, in my opinion, though perhaps politically necessary) actively appeasing the legacy industries, sometimes actively making its own search product worse. And, of course, as you would expect, these efforts are never enough for those industries. So now Google has taken to putting out a semi-regular report on how it fights piracy.

Today, Google came out with its latest such report which again shows that Google goes much, much, much further than the law requires -- and even much further than many are demanding the company already do. The headline pointer, which will get all the attention, is that YouTube's ContentID, by itself, has paid out over $2 billion. For some time now, Google has said that it's paid out over $3 billion to artists, but recent recording industry attack dogs have honed in on the fact that Google never broke out how much of the $3 billion was from ContentID. Now they're breaking it out somewhat -- noting $3 billion to the music industry and $2 billion from ContentID alone. The company also notes that over 98% of copyright management on Youtube is now via ContentID, rather than through DMCA takedown notices.

Of course, whether or not you think this is a good thing may depend heavily on your perspective. I appreciate that ContentID has created a new business model, but of course, we've seen how badly it performs in some situations leading to censorship or trollish behavior where some are using it to claim the revenue of other individuals.

The report also takes on the silly myth that Google likes to drive searchers to pirated information. They point out that the company has used the DMCA notices it receives as a signal to demote certain sites in search, and then points out that almost no one does the kinds of queries that still pop up infringing results (and it notes in a footnote that the examples it's using are ones that have been called out publicly by the RIAA and its friends):

Nevertheless, some critics paint a misleading picture by focusing on the results for rare, “long tail” queries, adding terms like “watch” or “free” or “download” to a movie title or performer’s name. While the search results for these vanishingly rare queries can include potentially problematic links, it is important to consider how rare those queries are. Look at the relative frequency of these Google searches in 2015:

“Star Wars The Force Awakens” searched 402× more often than “Watch Star Wars The Force Awakens”

“Taylor Swift” searched 4534x more often than “Taylor Swift download”

“PSY Gangnam Style” searched 104× more often than “PSY Gangnam Style download”

“Mad Max” searched 836× more often than “Mad Max stream”

“Pixels” searched 240× more often than “Watch Pixels”

And then there's this: Google is obviously far from perfect, and as I've said in the past (and above!) I think the company goes way too far in trying to appease an industry that is placing a ton of misplaced blame on Google for its own failures to innovate and change with the times. But because so many people seem to be accepting the myths of the legacy industries, now Google feels the need to go even further and release these "guys, we're doing way more than any law has ever required" reports.

And while I haven't seen it yet, I can almost guarantee that the RIAA, MPAA and its various friendly groups will be rushing out press releases attacking this as "not enough." Because it's never enough when you can blame the more successful company for your own failures.

Filed Under: blame, contentid, copyright, jealous, piracy, search
Companies: google, youtube