If you recall, not too long ago I did a blog post about how Google is being unfairly vilified by the music industry, as well as various governmental organisations, for not doing enough about piracy.
I mentioned how I didn’t think the criticism was fair. First of all, it can be argued that search engines contribute no more than minimally to piracy and furthermore, Google in all actuality is doing a lot to combat piracy. It is now being reported that this his year alone Google has received over 200 million takedown requests. To put this into perspective, in 2011 they received less than 10 million takedown notices in total. It is interesting to note that 50 million of the 200 million takedown notices filed have been from the BPI.
For the sake of clarity, I should mention that I do not have a problem with some of the onus being put on Google. I understand that because Google is indirectly making a profit from displaying these websites through advertising that they have some duty to take down offending links. However, my main issue is with criticism that Google needs to do more.
The internet is huge, and moreover it is continuously growing. Putting the onus on Google to take down offending links is not only unfair because the amount of labor involved, but is also altogether useless. At the very most, forcing google to censor search results will provide a short term solution with very little effect; even if this very second Google were to ban every single website that facilitates the theft of intellectual property, in the next two minutes there will be many more alternatives.
Source:
http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/bpi-sends-50-millionth-takedown-request-to-google/056752
http://torrentfreak.com/google-deleted-200-million-pirate-search-results-in-2013-131112/
