Rightsholders Asked Google To Remove Six Billion 'Pirate' Links (torrentfreak.com) 48
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Over the past decade, rightsholders have asked [Google] to remove six billion links to alleged copyright-infringing content. The majority of these requests were indeed removed or put on a preemptive blacklist. The six billion links were reported by 326,575 copyright holders who identified 4,041,845 separate domain names. These domains also include many false positives, including websites of The White House, the FBI, Disney, Netflix, the New York Times, and even TorrentFreak. Overall, we can say that a relatively small number of rightsholders are responsible for a disproportionate number of takedown requests. The ten most active senders reported nearly 2.5 billion URLs, more than 40% of the total. Similarly, as we previously highlighted, most of the removed URLs belong to a small group of websites. Just 400 domains are responsible for 41% of all links removed by Google over the years.
Google continues to remove more than a million URLs per day but the trend started to change a few years ago. The frequency at which new links were reported started to decline. At the same time, Google started to cooperate more with rightsholders. For example, Google began to accept takedown notices for links that are not indexed by the search engine yet. These links, which are also counted in the six billion figure, are put on a preemptive blocklist. That prevents the links from being added to search results in the future. Google also actively demotes pirate sites in its search results when it receives an unusually high number of takedown requests for a domain. In addition, the search engine chose to voluntarily comply with third-party site-blocking orders by removing entire domain names from its index. These proactive anti-piracy measures have started to improve the relationship between Google and rightsholders. And it wouldn't be a surprise to see this trend continue going forward.
Google continues to remove more than a million URLs per day but the trend started to change a few years ago. The frequency at which new links were reported started to decline. At the same time, Google started to cooperate more with rightsholders. For example, Google began to accept takedown notices for links that are not indexed by the search engine yet. These links, which are also counted in the six billion figure, are put on a preemptive blocklist. That prevents the links from being added to search results in the future. Google also actively demotes pirate sites in its search results when it receives an unusually high number of takedown requests for a domain. In addition, the search engine chose to voluntarily comply with third-party site-blocking orders by removing entire domain names from its index. These proactive anti-piracy measures have started to improve the relationship between Google and rightsholders. And it wouldn't be a surprise to see this trend continue going forward.
YouTube is full of copyright violations (Score:2, Redundant)
There's a ton [youtube.com] of copyright infringing material on YouTube [youtube.com].
Re:YouTube is full of copyright violations (Score:5, Interesting)
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Posting an episode of Family Guy that pans and scans and zooms and mirror images and speeds up the sound a bit is not content creation.
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Content creation is not a societal good.
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The value to society depends on the content itself not the act of creating it.
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Media that can produce money enough to pay for it can remix 100 years of 'new' media to stand on the shoulders of giants. This is most of the media that has built the minds of living people making it the most potent to reference for living audiences.
The peasants or artists doing art for art's sake or to make a non-lucrative or unpopular point must start in the 1900s
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Birdsong, Wind, self shot home video, People's own copyrighted music has all been claimed by others using content ID match ...
It's not as reliable as people think, and disputing it is tortuous
Youtube only cares about clicks (Score:2)
You can violate everything, everyone and their mother as long as you bring in the clicks and likes for Youtube.
I have seen people pretending to be able to talk to deceased famous actors and making a fortune on advertisements.
You can break all the laws in your country and still Youtube will let you publish the video and make money with it.
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I refuse to give Hollywood a dime. When I want to search for free 123 Movies, I've noticed search engine after search engine become useless. Now only yandex.com lets you find a pirate site to watch your movie without funding the beast that is Hollywood.
And lately politically motivated suppression is detectable on most search engines. Thanks Russia, for at least giving the big Fsck You to copyrights holders. ( granting copyright for longer than 20 years was a mistake - maybe copyright itself too - vide
Re: YouTube is full of copyright violations (Score:2)
So rather than watching any of the billions of FREE movies and videos, you have a need to watch the ones that took $10 million to produce.
Yet you refuse to pitch in your $1.99 toward that. You want the Hollywood product, you're not going to pay $2 to rent it, so instead you spend hours trying to find ways to steal it.
Genius.
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It's mostly hate watching. I pay for what I want to see more of.
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And it's possible to watch and be entertained by something you wish wasn't made. Sure it was made and was entertaining, but I would benefit more and my interests harmed less if it wasn't made. But since it was made, I may as well watch for free. I certainly shouldn't pay for it. There are things I watch that I would buy a ticket for at full price if the money could be subtracted from the pockets of the people who made it.
Re: YouTube is full of copyright violations (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s not my rationale for torrenting. Itâ(TM)s when Iâ(TM)m totally okay with spending a few bucks to view a series or a film, but itâ(TM)s locked away on a service that I have to open a monthly subscription for to view a single item.
Not as bad as Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft's AI or whatever it is must respond to any report, legit or not, with "OK". It will literally remove anything and everything requested, no questions asked.
This is why Bing is missing vasts swaths of the Internet in general. Most of it is NOT violating content. I have personally witnessed Bing crawl a site then REMOVE it from their index. Like completely, it doesn't even exist, not even a reference.
Reports to Microsoft to fix these problems are met with "you must be doing something wrong but we can
Really useful Google ranking actually (Score:4, Interesting)
Google also actively demotes pirate sites in its search results
Yes and you know what? It's super-useful: whenever I search for copyrighted material or a torrent, I know I'll find it near the end of the list of search results. So I go there directly and I don't have to sift through the ads, plugs and online stores that always heavily pollute the first 3 pages of any Google search these days.
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How far? At which page of search results do you stop getting pirated content and start getting viruses instead?
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The limit is often quite blurry.
Not that outrageous (Score:5, Informative)
These domains also include many false positives, including websites of The White House , the FBI, Disney, Netflix, the New York Times, and even TorrentFreak.
Are we sure those were all false positives? The last resident had a nasty habit of using music with neither the permission nor political endorsement of the artists who performed it. [wikipedia.org]
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You can use music as long as you pay whatever the rate is. And there was a case where an artist wanted to deny a politician the use of their music. The judge said nope, the purpose of copyright is to earn you money, not not earn you money. This hasn't been to the Supreme Court though, afaik.
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The judge said nope, the purpose of copyright is to earn you money, not not earn you money. This hasn't been to the Supreme Court though, afaik.
If it goes to this court then we know what will happen, and why.
But in general if your works are assigned to a licensing organization for licensing then you don't get to control who they're licensed to... And I suspect most popular works are.
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As a copyright holder you are absolutely allowed to dictate the terms under which your music is used. But those terms need to be spelled out in front and not claimed after the fact. Additionally the question is if the artist was still in control of the copyright or if they sold that control to a licensing company who then stipulate how the media is used.
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In this context, there were definitely cases where the rights holder had forbidden the usage of their works but he/they used them anyway.
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Re: Not that outrageous (Score:2)
I miss the WhiteHouse.com from the early 00s (Score:2)
The good old days (Score:1, Troll)
Re:The good old days (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember back when Google put our interests first?
You're adorable.
They don't harm anyone
They most definitely harm copyright holders. Whether that harm is particularly significant, is outweighed by the societal benefit, or if it is even of the scope and/or type that forms a legal foundation for the complaint, are subjects for another discussion, but to say no one suffers ill effects is just silly and wrong.
the law states that these are private platforms owned by private companies who have a right to determine what is said and done on the platforms that they own. I personally see this as a deficiency in the law,
Just curious, who do you think should have the legal right to dictate what is said and done on those platforms? Are you a big fan of other people telling you what you can and cannot do with your own stuff? Should property rights be lessened when something is owned by a group of people rather than a single person? That's all a corporation is, by the way - they were long ago given individual legal personhood not out of some insidious desire to create more evil in the world, it's just very difficult to get three thousand people together for a vote every time you need to sign a new maintenance contract for an office printer.
If you don't like the platform, don't use it. Encourage others not to use it. This sort of thing is not what 'laws' are for, you don't need the government to do everything for you. It's not there to get rid of all the things that offend your sensibilities, that's just the opposite side of the exact same problem you're bitching about.
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These days almost all copyright is held by a handful of trillion dollar multinational corporations that are in almost every meaningful way behaving like independent hostile nation-states. I'd argue harming them is in and of itself a societal good.
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Kind of irrelevant, most of that automatic copyright held by common people will never be enforced either because people don't care or its not economically viable to enforce it.
Will I or anybody else be getting any money for our posts Slashdot?
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Just curious, who do you think should have the legal right to dictate what is said and done on those platforms? Are you a big fan of other people telling you what you can and cannot do with your own stuff? Should property rights be lessened when something is owned by a group of people rather than a single person? That's all a corporation is, by the way - they were long ago given individual legal personhood not out of some insidious desire to create more evil in the world, it's just very difficult to get three thousand people together for a vote every time you need to sign a new maintenance contract for an office printer.
I think the law should be based on size, if you are small then do what you want block who you want. Kick that racist person out of your home, don't serve that gay couple in your cake shop, they can just go somewhere else. But when you get to a point when so big that your decisions have significant impact on society you should not. I see the reason the constitution controls government censorship is that at that time the only conceivable entity that had the power to significantly control information was the g
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I see the reason the constitution controls government censorship is that at that time the only conceivable entity that had the power to significantly control information was the government.
I hear tell of a thing that they had at the time known as "the press", which disseminate
Google & Youtube are the biggest pirates ever (Score:2)
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You forgot one.
I lurk on an authors' forum and there are repeated cases where books these people had written were being offered on Amazon, Amazon has been very slow to take such books down and has (or at least, had) no mechanism in place to stop the work being offered again by another fake author.
Then again I remember - around 5 years ago - a German computer magazine testing 15-20 Samsung smartphone batteries. They were expecting some to be fake, but not 100%. This applies to all kind of goods there, so b
The worst part about this is it's all refferences (Score:3)
If you are searching for something by category or topic and what you get are things you are already aware of an a notice that a large number aren't be shown to you due to DMCA requests, it's a pain.
It would be great if they would just keep the names of the works handy.
P.S. Please do not mention google's method of retrieving the take down requests that apparently does nothing.
There is a point where google search is lacking (Score:1)
Google uses AI on producing search results based on the requester's machine ID history.
The problem that this cause is:
Say you are at your physical work location's computer and you have done a search for something and saw some interesting results.
Then you go home and use your personal system to find what it was you had found interesting, But you can no longer find it because Google's AI has filtered the results with that machine's ID.
And of course, there is the problem of getting tons of search results that
Change the burden (Score:2)
Send out 6 billion form letters, individually marked, for specific details on why each link was infringing.
Libalous Statement Likely Not Human Checked (Score:2)