Google is well known for working with various organisations around the world to combat piracy. This is despite the fact that recent studies have shown that doing so has very little effect. The process Google goes through is complicated, but the basic premise is as follows: an organisation makes a takedown request; Google reviews it; and if approved the website is removed from display from their search results.
One of the largest groups that Google works with is the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI). The BPI is a collection of the UK’s top three record companies: Warner Music Group; Sony Music Entertainment; and Universal Music group. The BPI are notorious for making over 30 million takedown requests for Google in the span of just two years.
Out of those 30 million, one of the most requested takedown were made by the BPI for the Pirate Bay, one of the internet’s largest peer-to-peer downloading sites. Google complied with all of these requests, except one. The BPI made a request for Google to remove the home page of the Piratebay from their search results, however Google did not comply claiming a lack of legitimacy for the request. The lack of legitimacy, one would assume, is due to the fact that the homepage itself does not link directly to a download of a copyrighted file or a peer-2-peer file containing copyrighted material. This is not the first time Google has refused to remove the home page of a piracy website. In the past, the DMCA has requested Google to do the same for various other piracy websites, for which Google gave no consideration.
It goes without saying that this lack of action by Google is somewhat controversial. I suppose Google needs to stick to a very strict criteria for when they decide to remove websites. If the criteria is too flexible, they may find themselves being pushed around to censor more websites for less legitimate reasons. At the same time, I can see why organisations like the BPI and DMCA would be slightly agitated by such a decision. If you are going to remove websites from your search engine, for obvious reasons a request to take down the home page of a website should be legitimate.
However, as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, recent research shows that only on the rarest occasions will a person go to a piracy website through a search engine. Thus this entire controversy is probably overblown. Although, as I previously mentioned in another blog post, that the data of the research may be slightly unreliable. We have to consider from a practical standpoint that after finding a piracy website through a search engine a person will almost never use a search engine to find that website again. However, this is a discussion for an entirely different blog post.
Sources:
http://rt.com/news/google-pirate-bay-removal-704/
http://torrentfreak.com/google-refuses-to-remove-the-pirate-bay-homepage-130909/
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/owners/39071/BPI-LTD-MEMBER-COMPANIES/
