Last week, Google updated its anti-piracy efforts. The company noted that the majority of pirate sites lost most of their search traffic because Google ranked them low.
Then again, the company pointed out that it would not remove those sites’ domain names from its search results page. It is to avoid over-broad censorship.
The entertainment industries have been asking the Internet search giant to help them in their anti-piracy efforts. Thankfully, Google heard them and slowly implemented anti-piracy measures. On this report, you will find an overview of how the company combats piracy and help the entertainment industry.
Punishing apparent offenders is one of the anti-piracy efforts of Google. For certain key terms, pirated sites are demoted in search results. As a result of demotion policy, sites that offer pirated videos, music, etc. are losing search traffic from Google.
Even if Google punishes pirate sites, the entertainment industry groups are still calling for a more harsh response. What they want to for the Internet search giant is to remove pirate sites completely from the search results page. They also want that infringing links will never appear under a different domain name.
Unfortunately, Google does not want to oblige. According to the company, removing the entire sites can lead to censoring content that is legal. That is, whole-site removal will never be useful. Rather, it can only result in censoring right material.
The company took blogging sites as an example. These sites contain millions of pages from thousands of users. Many of these pages contain infringing materials.
Google also does not want to use the takedown approach. It is a method that proactively filter search results for all pirated content. According to the company, it is not feasible and necessary. One of its reasons is that it is hard to know if something is infringing in one place and not in a different place.
However, the company did suggest that copyright holders should use the takedown procedures and find those sites that pirate so the company can downlink them.
Furthermore, Google noted that search is not the only source of traffic to pirate sites. In fact, it only holds a small fraction of its users. Although Google wants to help alleviate piracy, it reiterates that the search engines are not the only way to eliminate piracy.
The reason for that is that search engines do not have full control on the web. Google recommended that copyright holders should make sure that those pirate sites will be cut off from their sources of revenue.
