Pirate Bay back online and back on Google Pirate Bay is back on Google, and back online, following a double whammy of downtime and a wrongly served DMCA notice. Last week thepiratebay.org was removed from Google's search results. The page revealed that Google was responding to a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice - a legal warning from the owners of …
"I'm starting to not like google - too much of this cloak+dagger stuff. Unfortunately I've tried Bing and the results simply aren't as good."
I've never liked google, I've never been keen their business methods. And I don't find their search results particularly good either. It's much too biased towards advertising and selling. The "correct" result is often several results down the list, if not several pages. I was searching for something last night and the first page of results didn't even contain all the words in my query, it was only on page two that a site with all the words and, indeed, the exact phrase cropped up. Shirley it should give priority to the exact phrase. Then there's the issue of it substituting words. Try something with "signing" in the query and you'll get lots of results with "singing" and it doesn't seem to be something you can easilly turn off. Deaf people must really love google.
Google are all too willing to roll over to things like DMCA takedown notices or indeed political pressure, but not when it comes to their own dodgy practices. I don't see how a DMCA notice could affect a search engine anyway, Shirley they are protected?
Bing's not bad at all, and there are others, but you need to watch out for the ones that use Google as their back end. And Bing's "birds eye" views are a lot better than the satelite images in google, plus you can have OS mapping rather than the shite google use.
It's only the best Search Engine for Porn (US Settings ONLY!), but changing the Location Settings should be simple enough. Bing even provides a 30 Second Clip of each Vid ;-)
Not so sure if it's good for anything else though.
But as a Porn Search Engine it's THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST... etc
... and EMPowerment Spectra.
"I don't think anyone tagged a porn firm as the reason behind the DMCA takedown." ... By Anonymous Coward Posted Monday 5th October 2009 09:53 GMT
Probably a most likely future event in the making , AC...... for some of that New Fangled Entangling Quantum String Theory for Live Operational Virtual Environments Controlled by Global Operating Devices InterNetworking Absolutely Fabulous Ideas with CyberIntelAIgently Designed Entities.
Venus in Blue Genes, ITs Drive Source Energy .... Immaculate Passion ReSearch and dDevelopment. And as you can surely Imagine, a heavily oversubscribed Underground Service with Petty Political Bottlenecks Creating Derivative Future Options under Ill Judged and Unpoliceable Regulations.
Does Man have any Defences at all against SMART Porn with Manic Nymphs and XSSXXXXPerienced Satyrs? Perfumed Garden Lovers? Except Complete Unconditional Surrender to Superior Provisional Forces, that is. :-)
'I don't see how a DMCA notice could affect a search engine anyway'
So what you are saying is that Google would be committing no crime as they are merely linking to something dodgy, not hosting it themselves...?
That would seem a completely sane and logical argument. However that is exactly what The Pirate Bay are doing and they have just been successfully prosecuted for it.
Admittedly the trial was a travesty, presided over by a judge with a blatant conflict of interests, in which no evidence of any actual crime being committed by the defendants was presented and the prosecution failed to even demonstrate a proper comprehension of how the technology involved worked (or attempted to deliberately misrepresent it). If it didn’t have such serious connotations for the rest of us* it would be funny.
*ie. That the law is irrelevant, if you piss off big business you are going down.
TPB and Google are not the same. Google does not run torrent trackers and if you complain to Google that they are hosting a link to copyright content they take it down. They don't send you and email telling you to "fuck off", as TPB do. If TPB took down content when requested and didn't actually host the trackers, they would not have been prosecuted. In fact they could probably get away with hosting trackers, if they just took down content when asked to do so.
Fraser, you seem to be hung up on the fact that a torrent tracker is a file... That still shouldn't make it any more or less illegal than a text link on a page. It is still just a link to something, not the thing itself.
You currently search google for "copyrighted content x" and they serve you a html page containing a text link to "www.dodgysite.com/copright_content_x.mp3" (or whatever) which your browser displays and you say that is fine... But by your logic if google instead provided you with a text document that contained the same link that would suddenly be illegal? That's just daft.
As for Google taking down copyrighted content... that's open to debate. They are certainly politer about things than TPB and smart enough to 'play the game'... But lets face it - they don't go out of their way to prevent their site indexing such content and in fact you could argue that through some of their other services (image search etc) they actually host more copyrighted content than anyone else on earth (in their caches).. meaning that unlike TPB they DO actually break copyright law by directly republishing it without permission.
Incidentally I don't use the Pirate Bay, I don't download dodgy mp3s, movies or games. I get my entertainment from legitimate sources like Steam and I Tunes (and shock/horror I go to the cinema), so I would not consider myself a 'freetard'.
I do however worry about what the PB verdict means on a wider scale. It seems just the latest example of how the biggest crime seems to be threatening the profits of large corporations and that it will be punished irrespective of normal judicial process, evidence or even the law.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
