Media groups propose anti-piracy 'code of practice' for UK search Internet search engines that operate in the UK could stop publishing links to websites that are deemed to be substantially infringing copyright under plans proposed by groups representing rights-holders. The groups have proposed a voluntary code of practice for search engines in a bid to get them to engage more in tackling …
I think you'll find that was a privalege given by the people to the creators -- not a right enshrined on them. Maybe it's time the people took it back because with the mickey mouse copyright laws and perpetual licenses the content creators are breaching OUR terms and conditions.
Burn them all I say -- good content gets paid for one way or another.
"Google (or any search engine that operates an apps platform) should: effectively screen applications to see if they are likely to substantially facilitate or encourage infringement or otherwise designed to facilitate infringement; take down mobile apps where it is aware that they are designed or known to be used to illegally download entertainment content, either via p2p [peer-to-peer] applications or unauthorized lockers;"
A still or video camera app can, if YouTube alone is anything to go by, be used to "substantially facilitate or encourage infringement". How many clips have you seen of something that has been recorded off of a TV screen, footage recorded at concerts or festivals, video of friends in bars/nightclubs having nothing more than a good time, innocent birthday parties with someone having "Happy Birthday" sung to them? Hundreds? Thousands? Well, chances are each and every one of those is infringing somebodies copyright. So if freely available still/video cameras are not substantially facilitating or encouraging infringement then I don't know what is!
Music/video playback apps can play unauthorized copies of music and video files, surely they must be encouraging the further downloading of infringing material.
What constitutes an "unauthorized locker"? One can only assume this will mean ANY locker service, that has not been authorized by the BPI/MPA/PACT; meaning one from which they don't get a cut. Will they be able to stop all services like Dropbox from offering an app, or at least make it more difficult to find? After all, they CAN be used to store and download infringing material because they provide public links.
How broad, or vague, will the definition of a "Search Engine" be? How broad, or vague, will the definition of an apps platform be? Will this, when it suits the BPI/MPA/PACT/Premier League, come to eventually mean ANY site that offers a search facility (after all, that has to have an "engine" behind it) and/or has software that can substantially facilitate and encourage infringment? Will CNet be forced to stop providing links to CD/DVD rippers, P2P software? What about Amazon? They are not, by current definitions, a search engine and they do not have an apps platform (like Google does) but their Android apps market is well known. Will Google have to drop links to Amazon for software they've had to drop from their own apps market?
Any time organisation says rule X will not apply to Y, or defines rule X to cover whatever they need it to at the moment of their choosing, will, sure as eggs are eggs, stomp all over Y with rule X the split second it suits them.
If God were truly real, I'd like to see him turn up and sue every one of these bloodsucking fuckers for infringing his copyright. After all, he created them and I believe I remember (just before being born) seeing a contract that says whilst I am incarnate, anything I create is the Intellectual Property of God.
(This isn't a serious post (for those people who are hard of understanding))
I just searched for "+X-Factor +Greatest +Hits +mp3" and I found nothing....
Thank God.
Seriosouly though, if you want to hide a lie, surround it with obscuring truths.
The copyright mafiaa are fighting a loosing war, first they tried to sue websites out of existence, that worked initially but for every site they took down, 10 more sprang up to replace them. Then they tried to sue downloaders out of existence, they bribed their political lap dogs to introduce legislation that allowed punitive damages against downloaders, the result was single mothers on welfare were given fines for hundreds of thousands of dollars, all that achieved was to hold the copyright mafiaa and the law up to ridicule.
They come up with new DRM systems only to have them broken in a relatively short period of time.
So does anybody actually believe that prevent copyright material in a google search will achieve anything? Or are the copyright mafiaa beginning to believe their own king canute like propaganda? If searching online does not show any links to TPB, I’ll go to the TPB site and search there!!
The copyright mafiaa have stepped up the war several notches; their first attempt at legislating away copyright infringement, DMCA which tried to criminalise any technology that could be used to circumvent DRM, was a failure, and as it turns out, 57% of notices sent to google under the DMCA to demand removal of links were sent by businesses targeting competitors, not copyright infringers.
They have manipulated the law making system to give us ACTA and SOPA, ACTA is a particularly insidious route to take as it is only a trade agreement and all discussions about ACTA have taken place in secret, signatory countries are then expected to enact legislation to support the trade agreement.
The copyright mafiaa have only one goal, total control of the interwebs, this attempt to get copyright infringement removed from search engines is only the first step in a long process, unfortunately their approach is a bit like tying to clean up the banking system by blocking access to the Bahamas, Cayman Islands etc.
These people also miss the main point that lawmakers have been missing when trying to compel ISPs to block stuff.
An ISP is paid by a customer to be a gateway to the internet, that's it. Not to police said access, just connect someone to the world and keep quiet. The same goes for search engines, they provide a searching service and if someone wants to search for "I WANT FREE MUSIC TORRENT" then that's the searcher's call and it is not for the search engine to censor any result. They are, after all, a SEARCH engine not a police/commercial puppet ... or at least they bloody well shouldn't be.
Quote: "We believe that search engines have a role to play in protecting consumers..."
ah yes, it's all for my benefit, but of course. So that I... what? Oh, yes, so that I don't get into trouble through doing something I shouldn't be doing,as famously Mr google suggested. How good of them to think of my well-being, as always, soooo thoughtful!
btw, it would be quite hilarious if this filtering was introduced and, consequently, Google were to be pushed down the rank of the most popular search engines in the UK. Dethroned by Baidu, for example :)
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what i can't help but think is that if there's a real monetary loss for these companies, then they should have a vested financial interest in the recourse. if there's a significant financial loss to them, they should have no problem in pursuing it themselves from the profits that they're still clearly making in the middle of a recession. this would have the added advantage that, at some point, the losses they're incurring would be less than the cost of pursuing them, at which point they'd be fools to chase it further. personally, i think they're probably already at that point, which is why they're trying to get others to pay for their policing instead.
ultimately, they appear to miss the fact that if you provide goods for reasonable prices that are what people actually want, then there's no need for piracy. as an example, i could buy a pvr that records content from, say, the bbc in hd. it will, however, store the content in an encrypted format that i can't access from any other device that i own, despite the content being paid for by my licence fee. so, to access this content that i've paid for in the manner that i choose that's convenient for me, i have no choice but to find a drm-free source instead, or to break the encryption, or use a third-party tool that (as an example) could pull it down from iplayer and store it drm-free. and that's content that i'm legally obliged to pay for.
Clear evidence that they don't get this internet thing.
Who knows where a search engine "operates"? It might or might not have web servers in the UK. They might be handling requests themselves or proxying for app engines elsewhere. The underlying databases are distributed replicas of a dataset that's probably been created by numerous little computers in lots of locations.**
If your search engine really is located in the UK and it stops giving you the results you want, you'll just switch to a different, possibly offshore, one.
** I stand ready to be corrected by somebody who actually knows about search engines.
For the sake of argument, let's say I wanted to see if there were any free MP3 downloads from Lackluster (an alias of electronic artist Esa Ruoho). Typing in "lackluster download free mp3" into Google currently gives the following link as the third result: http://www.lackluster.org/releases?type=69&format=All
Scanning through that page, I count over 20 recordings which the artist has made available for free download. After checking out the site, it's fairly obvious that this is legit and that kudos is due to the artist for providing us with such an array of freebies. However, if these proposals were to be implemented, my search terms would be subject to extra scrutiny since it includes many trigger words. I realise that the proposals here would not automatically stop me from accessing the search results in this case, /provided/ the artist has taken steps to register his site with an as yet non-existent "certification" entity. However, no guarantees are given that the site will not be blacklisted by default based purely on my search terms.
It's highly likely that these "certification" entities will, in fact, be either collection agencies or agents of the big labels. Neither have a sterling record (to pardon the pun) when it comes to copyrights they don't actually own. A case in point is Edwyn Collins, who was (in)famously prevented from sharing his music via myspace: see http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/06/edwyn-collins-sharing-music
The essential point that I am trying to make here is that although the proposals seem innocuous enough on first reading (provided you read past the knee-jerk reaction that this is simply censorship, pure and simple, and try to see some merit in them), I think it's highly likely that this will end up hurting independent artists. In effect, the established players (not really a good word for them) in the music industry are attempting to set themselves up as gatekeepers, deciding what you can and cannot access. It doesn't matter whether their intentions are as pure and egalitarian as they make themselves out to be here, it's almost guaranteed that "mistakes" will happen, and innocent sites will find themselves cut off from their audiences.
The devil is really in the details of implementation. Can independent artists (including those artists that just compose, record and release music just for fun) ensure that all the search engines won't blacklist them by default? What happens if takedown notices are issued in error? Will the accusation count for more than the eventual exoneration (ie, will there be mechanisms for ensuring that accusations are effectively forgotten once overturned)? How will sites and artists know that their traffic is being blocked by search engines? How will sites and artists know who to contact to remedy the situation? What sort of bureaucracy will be involved in getting un-delisted? What happens to site rankings if some legitimate takedown orders are processed against it--will other users of the site end up being tarred with the same brush and have their details delisted? What about searches with similar keywords? What about sites like archive.org? What about blocking sites in other countries that don't use English as the lingua franca? Et. cetera...
Just my €0.02.
if implemented as proposed, this would eventually make it impossible to look for any mp3, wma etc... file whatsoever, since album names famously can contain just about anything. Throw in artists' names and other languages besides English, and they could just as well ban any search involving media files and be done with it.
It's the "automatically redirect you to the site *we* think you should be looking for" part that rubs me the wrong way. Google et al being forced by media companies to list results in the "approved" order. There are plenty of smaller "review" sites out there that discuss "licenced content" but are not promoting or facilitating piracy. Under this proposal these sites will be required to pay the requisite licence fee just to remain findable in Google results.
It's like wanting to find details/review about the latest tech gizmo and google only being allowed to show you links to the manufacturer and "authorised" resellers.
Here come the thought police.
It's amazing how fast these concerned citizens... er, copyright holders are to propose how others should clean up their act to make things easy for the copyright holders. But they seem to be uninterested in cleaning up their *own* shoddy work habits which cause people to pirate in the first place.
Case in point: A movie I *want* to buy was released in the States on Jan 24. I asked the local stores when I could expect to see it on the shelves around here... and got told "not before mid-March". Explain this to me - it's not like the movie is still playing in theatres around here.
So my choices are now the suck-up the industry's blatant disregard for me as a customer ("yeah, you'll want for us to be good and ready like a good little sheeple"), buy it from the US, or just simply download it overnight.
And the industry wonders why pirate downloads are so popular.
Yest another example of the privatisation of justice. Hide quasi judicial decisions behind a smokescreen of commercial stonewalling. We only have to look at how well the likes of Facebook respond to complaints about unjustified censorship, typically they don't.
Before there is any extension to censorship it must be placed on an equitable and rational basis. There are two major requirements:
1. It must be based on evidence of harm, not the myth and prejudice which drives most of it at present. That prejudice results in widespread and often serious harm.
2. There must be a single point of appeal. At present every internet service provider, mobile phone operator, social network, or whatever has to be fought individually and that is completely impractcable. It makes a nonsence of freedom of expression if the means of expression are denied.
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