Google now gets 250k copyright takedown requests EACH WEEK Google now regularly receives more copyright 'notice and takedown' requests from rights-holders in a week than it did during the entirety of 2009, the company has said. The internet giant said it has experienced a 'rapid' increase in the number of takedown requests and added that it is "not unusual" for it to receive requests …
I am not defending Google but surely the copyright holders should be contacting the Websites owners/creators asking them to remove the material from their websites. Hence when the Google spiders update they will no longer reference copyrighted material.
In this case Google is actually helping the copyright owner due to the fact that Google bring to light the fact that the sites exist publically. The copyright owners would have been unaware that the sites even exist if they were not referneced by google, this by way does not stop the connaisseurs from knowing about their existance..
I know that it is a double edged sword. but it's like asking the newspapers to remove articles for "prostitution services". The only thing that will change is that the publicity will be gone but the "prostitution" will still remain.
Mines the one with "I Killed the messenger" on the back.
It's easier to go after Google than the actual infringer. After all, if Google doesn't index it, it doesn't exist right?
Of course, it's harder to go after every search engine. But after a listing has been taken off Google, it magically makes it disappear from Altavista, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, Excite, and the rest..
Not sure I get your point - The copyright holder has to inform google and google take action. I've had to do this myself and google acted quickly.
In the past I've tried directly asking for stolen content to be taken down and it just doesn't work. Contacting the website hosting company doesn't help either.
I think google do a good job here.
As to your prostitution example, its rubbish. If you take away every means of advertising a service then the service with wither away. On the web the whole point of stealing content is to build sites and make money on advertising - if google won't let you show in the search results then you are utterly wasting your time.
@Chris
I used prostition as an example of one of a multitude of vices that could have been used. Google is merely a window of opportunity for any/all of these vices.
There has been a market for the various vices, prostitution / forgery / theft etc existed long before the Internet ever existed ( lets go back at least as far as the Greeks). These markets will never disappear they will merely progress and adapt to their environments.
Removing Google from the equation will force alternative solutions to be found, which they inherently will.
Killing the messenger never resolves problems, it merely pushes them elsewhere.
@Khaptain
Prostitution still requires advertising - even if it's someone standing on a street corner winking at people walking by. And that was my point if you take ALL advertising avenues away, then the business disappears.
Also, as far as I'm aware - and I have gone through this process with my own site, google don't simply change their search results, they ask for the content to be removed. As long as google check that it is content theft I really can't see what people could possibly be whining about.
I can only assume it's because you refer to copyright infringement as "stealing". I'm not condoning it, but the language used should be clear - stealing refers to the removal of something from someones possession, not making a copy of something. It is more correct to refer to this as copyright infringement, or perhaps even copyright dilution.
re: Stealing: Enter the words "definition" and "steal" into Google and what comes back includes this:
Dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own: "accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying".
I'd say that pretty much covers taking someone's hard work and not paying them for it.
You are making two errors in your argument:
1. Just because their is a colloquial use of the word "steal", it doesn't mean that it is what the law says. Stealing (theft) in the UK is "dishonestly taking property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive them of it".* Dishonesty is a two-part test involving an objective component (would most people think it was dishonest?), and a subjective (did the defendant believe it was dishonest?)**
2. "Passing off" is a legal term in which someone claims that something was created by her/him when in fact it was created by someone else. It is a tort (i.e. common law, not criminal law). In the music example, it would involve someone claiming that they composed/sang/played instrument on the track when in fact it was someone else. It is not merely copying a track and saying "This is mine now".
* Theft Act 1968, s1.
** R v Ghosh [1982] EWCA Crim 2
"Admittedly there is probably a lot of "please squash these 100 links to this video of Max Mosely" repetition, but even so..."
I think that the bulk of the reason right there, the Google counsel mentioned that these 1,200,000 odd requests "targeted some 24,000 different websites.". That equates to 1 every couple of minutes, or 1.5 / minute over a 8-hour work day, if each link to a site was unique - still quite a lot in absolute terms but easily manageable with a modest number of operators. I would imagine that the true number is somewhere in between the two, and that the site aggregation is almost certainly done automatically (if would be mad not to).
I do think it's a huge overreaction to compare copyright infringement to murder, but to continue your analogy, removing a link to infringing material is more like taking away the weapons from a serial killer.
Taking action against an infringer to remove content is slow, expensive and seldom practical, particularly if the infringer is located in a different jurisdiction. And most of the time, any action not backed up by the threat of legal consequences will be met with no response at all.
It's great to see all the people who say that Google should be taken down, like The Pirate Bay, because they index pirated material too, now saying that it should be the source of the material that should be taken down.
The pro-"take what you want and screw the artists" arguments were always poor, but this is incredible.
It's quite hilarious to see how many equate being listed on Google with being on the internet!
I get the feeling content owners want Google (for them read: Internet) to be like the Yahoo! web portals of old.
Fine let them eat cake I say, let them DCMA Google back into the 90's and I'll keep using the internet how I always used it, to discover knowledge and new content.
Google's success was down to the fact it didn't behave like a web-portal... there will soon be another search service to replace it -- if not some competing alternative DNS services.
google's take downs are excellent. At the bottom of the results page it says something like "X results have been removed from the results here because of DCMA take down requests. Click here to read these requests."
They then publish the full request, with URLs, for you to check. Thus handing you immediately, the most likely places of success for whatever it is you are trying to get a hold of. Try it for yourself!
Google search for stream live football
(bugger, seems as though that takedown notice is no longer valid but my point stands!)
Here is an example of what the above AC mentioned
<quote>
"In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at **********.org."
</quote>
I removed the website name in order to avoid causing them problems.
We periodically get content lifted from our websites. The people who do this generally aggregate our stuff with stuff lifted from other websites to make a composite 'site' of their own. They then sell advertising on that site. And no, they and the host (usually in the far east) won't take it down when you ask.
Generally these sites advertise on Google's adsense program. Informing Google that these sites are infringing copyright not only kills their main source of revenue (people finding the site via websearch) but Google also removes them from adsense, so it kills their income from the other side as well.
Not quite whack-a-mole. I'd compare it with weeding the garden. Sure the 'weeds' always come back, but what's the alternative? You have to do it periodically, not least because experience with one site we did not defend shows it was copied by sites copying the original infringing site and we quickly lost control of the content.
If the google were sincere about opposing the criminalization of the Internet, they would obviously focus on better community-based tools. My own peeve is email spam, but have you looked at the gawdawful webform that eventually "handles" a spammer's use of the google? Pitiful.
I don't understand exactly why the google has become so tolerant of the criminals. It obviously has something to do with their determination to make profits, and I think it's also related to their increasing evolution to evil.
It used to be that I didn't blame the google for becoming evil, since that's essentially how it works in America. The least ethical businessmen bribe the cheapest politicians to rig the game in their favor. I think a good business should be in business to stay in business, though you can make a morally neutral argument that a good business is in business to make a sustainable profit. However, the rules of American business is that every business must grow like a cancer or be destroyed--and the game riggers are ignoring the little question of what eventually happens to cancers and their hosts. Too big to fail? Yeah, the dinosaurs thought so, too.
However, in recent news, it turns out that the google has become the leading lobbyist among tech companies, beating out such other contenders as Apple and Microsoft. Kind of hard to absolve them now, eh?
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