
PCPro has an interesting feature about intellectual property and whether Google could – and should – do more to prevent online piracy. The search giant, which also owns YouTube, has been accused of failing to do enough to remove links to pirated material from its search results. While recently a Dutch court ruled that linking to a Pirate Bay proxy was illegal, and a UK court ordered major British ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, Google searches still offer a wide range of links to pirated content. Viacom has even taken Google to court over what it sees as the search giant’s inaction over copyrighted uploads to YouTube. Owner of Newscorp and 20th Century Fox Rupert Murdoch even took some time away from hacking phones to accuse Google of being a “Piracy leader”.
Should Google invest more time and effort in removing links to pirated content? Would they even be able to if they wanted to – what technical measures could they use? If legal download sites were more readily available, would users start to move away from illegal sites?
The PCPro article discusses the lack of legal download services, their lack of prominence in search results, and possible solutions including “certifying” official music sites to make them appear higher in search rankings than illegitimate sites.
Leave a Reply