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Google plays the filesharing card
PIRATE BAY AND ITS ILK could soon benefit from a Google legal challenge to the music and film industries' claims that search engines help promote 'piracy'.
According to the Associated Press, Google has asked a California judge to declare that by linking to copyright infringing works on Rapidshare, the search giant is not facilitating the illegal distribution of copyrighted songs.
If Google wins, not only will the content industries have to leave it alone, but there might be a few problems for some of the actions against filesharing sites. Pirate Bay and the like have long argued that they were like Google and only provided links to torrent files. If they changed their sites to emphasise the similarities then it would be impossible for the movie and film industries to take them down.
This California legal challenge was sparked by Blue Destiny Records, a small blues-oriented music label, suing Google, Microsoft and Rapidshare in Florida last year. Blue Destiny claimed at the time that Rapidshare was running "a distribution center for unlawful copies of copyrighted works" and that the Google's and Microsoft's search engines were helping to prop up the company. The label argued that users can easily find copyrighted songs on file-hosting websites by doing a simple search query.
It was supposed to be the big clincher about whether search engines could be found guilty of contributory copyright infringement. But in late March, Blue Destiny voluntarily withdrew its lawsuit. Google then asked the company to waive the right to pursue its copyright infringement allegations. According to Google, the label refused, preserving its legal options. So now Google is going back to court asking for a declaratory judgement that it is not promoting the infringement of Blue Destiny's copyrights.
A ruling in Google's favour on this is what the big content industries dreaded, which is why they have never moved to sue the search outfit. However if Google loses it could find itself in trouble and be forced to make serious changes to its search operations. µ
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"Google has gotten where they are today largely by giving people what THEY inherently want, and they seem to be realizing that the more control and input they receive and act upon from their customers, the better off they and their customers are."
Maybe that was true in the earl 2000's, but their tracking and indirect data mining changes are degrading user experience.
"As far as I can see, Pirate Bay exists solely to facilitate access to bootleg media files.
mostly, though not solely. I think tpb has some 'legal torrents'. Currently i have a lot of torrents for os, rescue cds, some media. all free/oss. About half of the .torrent from linuxtracker. The rest from scattered locations. I'd guess some are cohosted on tpb. Somebody might clain that tpb's legal files are a beard ;-)
"Even if humans were to be employed, how would they know that some content, say video or audio is copyrighted"
google (youtube) seems confident they're removing legally objectionable media.
bigger_luddite says: "how could they find content at all with a restriction that search results be "legal"? An "approved" list won't quite do it, unless all resale of physical items is also removed."
But who will determine what is not copyrighted?
Even if humans were to be employed, how would they know that some content, say video or audio is copyrighted?
Odd to select the pirate bay as an example, since they are in sweden and subject not to any jurisprudence in the US, because it might surprise you, and many lawyers and companies, to learn that the US law is not enforceable on the entire planet..
Also they already broke the old system where they could not touch a non-sharing link by saying it was 'aiding' long ago and made some industry sponsored/written new laws to make that even worse, regardless that that was against their constitution, ssame as recently was again done in britain, they don't care about fair and reasonable or logical, they just buy laws and the lousy shifty politicians take bribes to either vote for them or if they feel that too obvious to simply not show up during vote so those that are willing can vote it in.
I'm not sure why judges even bother, oh yeah they want money too, nm then.
Google finds web pages, which are mostly mostly legal. As far as I can see, Pirate Bay exists solely to facilitate access to bootleg media files.
At one time you used to find a lot of complete bootleg book texts in Google, but respect of copyright in text now seems to have been brought mostly under control. I mean, you'll get people copying entire magazine articles, but not copyrighted books. The problem remains that copyright under past and present law lasts different terms in different parts of the world, so my public domain text may be your copyright violation, or vice versa.
Google is good (aka "non-evil") when compared to autocratic corporations like Apple and Microsoft -- but of course they could be even better.
Corporate goals can align with those of customers, and this DOES NOT have to be done by "forcing" or "convincing" these customers to "comply" with corporate initiatives, or by threatening them or treating them like criminals or children (as typically done by Microsoft, the media industry, and Apple).
Google has gotten where they are today largely by giving people what THEY inherently want, and they seem to be realizing that the more control and input they receive and act upon from their customers, the better off they and their customers are. They are starting to give customers a "vote" on some things under development in Google Labs, and I hope this expands to all their products.
Google also is offering to open-source the VP8 video codec they bought for over $100M when they acquired ON2 technologies. They want to freely donate this for anyone to use to exchange video on the web (including their competitors - everyone), yet we learn now from Apple CEO Steve Jobs (and Microsoft as well) that a "patent pool" is being assembled to legally attack open-source video codecs (allegedly in conjunction with the media industries and MPEG-LA, in order to make sure that only the rich benefit and control the ability to exchange information in the form of video).
Free speech, the freedom to communicate in any form over the Internet, can be "good" for both citizens and companies. Microsoft, Apple and the media industries do not seem to understand this, but Google does. We should be allowed to share things over the Internet without having Big Brother abolish this right because it "could" be used to share "copyrighted" music, etc. If I record my own song, I should be free to share it if I want. There are ways around this issue -- like distributing music and video for a minimal cost and providing proportionately more income to the artists -- which can address this issue without violating citizens' rights. Keeping media largely "on the cloud" likewise addresses this issue.
So supporting companies like Google who support your rights seems to be a good idea, whereas supporting companies like Apple, Microsoft, and the media cartels (who apparently think only of their own rights) seems to me like a very "bad" idea.
i have no faith in the court systems. Victor goes to the larger wallet. You'd think this would be google except the so called "small guy" in this will have support from riaa, mpaa, disney and all their political puppets like obumba and joe biden so it's really not clear here.
along these lines already due to an obvious corruption of the court system, besides no doubt behind the scenes pressure. Moneyed interests nearly always get what they want. In any case, this won't currently apply to them.
Now, go_ogle has a tough but sheerly mechanical problem that I'd say is what moves them here: how could they find content at all with a restriction that search results be "legal"? An "approved" list won't quite do it, unless all resale of physical items is also removed.
So I'm not going to view go_ogle as a champion of freedom here, either. I'd say it's just a small battle where moneyed interests temporarily have differing goals in the wider game which is for overall control.