Piracy is one of the biggest disgraces for the entertainment industry. The entertainment companies have held search engines like Google responsible for ‘promoting’ piracy by listing contents of torrent websites, thereby making the torrent files easily available for the consumers who download contents illegally from the internet. Sometimes it is believed that the search engines direct legitimate consumers to the illegal and unauthorized sites by making the link available to them.
The internet is filled with websites and portals that endorse piracy and illegal content download, which includes movies, TV shows, and music, which are the source of income for the entertainment industry.
When the contents are made available to consumers for free, it affects the revenue of the industry and poses as a copyright infringement and also the violation of intellectual property rights of people who are associated with the movie, show or music. For years, the makers of the movie, shows, and music have believed that search engines like Google make the websites easily discoverable to the mass.
This belief of the entertainment industry has led to an endless ‘torrent’ of DMCA takedown requests from the artists associated with the industry. The requests from the copyright holders are breaking records one after the other. In the year 2011, Google received only few takedown requests per day. But now, Google handles about 1500 links to illegal pages from their search results each minute, or 25 requests per second, which is almost 100 percent increase compared to that of last year.
In the past few months, Google received requests for the deletion of pirated links from 5,609 copyright holders that targeted some 65 million links and together it spanned across 68,484 different domains. While most of the URLs reported by copyright holders has been removed from Google’s search results, the company is also facing trouble with duplicate requests and the massive volume of notices that keep pouring in.
In the last few days, several meetings were held to decide on ways to eradicate the promotion or consumption of pirated contents on the internet. It was decided during the meeting that Google, including other search engines, will implement new methods to check the spread of online piracy that exists currently in several regions of the world. Banning the torrent site links from the search results will resist the viewing of the links to torrent files and the portals. This was a much-awaited step taken by the company and was welcomed by the people who are associated with the anti-piracy organizations and the entertainment industry. The Hollywood studios and search engines like Google have finally come to an agreement to such a term to ban internet piracy to preserve authentication of the copyrighted contents. The consumers of the illegal torrent contents can, however, access the torrent portals directly, but the removal of links will make locating the sites tougher.
Google attended to the issues faced by the people from the entertainment industry and tried to resolve it by implementing several changes to its search algorithm by down-ranking some sites that received the most deletion choices based on the violation of copyrights. These changes made the torrent sites less visible, but recently it has been seen that the streaming sites still have maintained a top position in search results.
Industry groups like MPAA and RIAA believe that any aggressive step taken by Google to blacklist the sites that offend the copyright laws will help in combating online piracy.
