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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

I said this before last time around on this non-issue:

Google are not preventing people reaching tpb results.

They are declining to actively push these results unbidden upon people.

The massive, fundamental difference between these two things should be obvious.

Do we really think it's unreasonable for google to decline to actively point it's users towards largely illegal material which they had not explicitly requested?

Google is a publicly traded, for-profit corporation. They have every right to do whatever the hell they want, within law, to make their business as successful as possible. If you don't like it, go use DuckDuckGo, or start your own engine. There's a public domain page index available now, have at it.

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Out of all those users typing "torren" in Google's search bar, what percentage are trying to reach "torrent" and what percentage are trying to reach the Torrens land title system? Because right now Google is only showing me Torrens, and I suspect 99.99%+ of all users typing "torren" want torrents.

Just so you know, the lame arguments you are making are not new or novel. Throughout history, all episodes of censorship have been met with the response that the material isn't REALLY censored, not for sufficiently determined readers. Douglas Adams provided the definitive mocking of that idea:

>`But look you found the notice didn't you?' >`Yes,' said Arthur, `yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".'

Just because it's not 100% effective - Arthur did find the notice, after all - doesn't mean it's not censorship. The word has never meant that. Google is attempting to make this material less available to people who want to get it, and is succeeding. 100% effectiveness is not part of the definition, and never has been.

"Out of all those users typing "torren" in Google's search bar, what percentage are trying to reach "torrent" and what percentage are trying to reach the Torrens land title system? Because right now Google is only showing me Torrens, and I suspect 99.99%+ of all users typing "torren" want torrents."

Type into search field: baldur's gate torren

Response: Showing results for baldur's gate torrent

You were saying? Looks fine to me.

So if someone types "child por" in, should Google autocomplete if a common request is "child porn"?

Also, don't call the guy's argument lame, just answer it. Be civil.

yes? why wouldn't they?

You might feel differently if your kid had been raped, say. When you only have one principle to deal with, life is simple, but I think there are grey areas in all these issues.

Similarly, the argument to legalise drugs. Personally, I agree with the argument, but a similar demand-supply problem exists in human trafficking (e.g. child sex slavery), but there I think the laws should continue to keep the latter illegal even while it supports the high profits that human traffickers can make. What do you think?

hmm? 'Rape' has auto suggestions.

In general I dont think that consumption of child pornography is much of a crime, the harm has been done by then, and some poor sad git masturbating over a 3 year old isn't going to make it any worse.

Personally I would rather they put significant resources into catching those people who create it, than into changing search engines and blocking dns addresses so that everyone can pretend it doesn't exist.

Demand encourages supply.

Even if nobody's paying?

Given the threat our lawmakers believe piracy poses to content-producers, and that they wish to suppress the production of child porn, perhaps they should actually encourage the piracy of child porn...

(I jest, of course, but the law itself is none too rational here.)

yep. demand exists, so does supply.

I am unsure what problem you actually believe is being solved by google?

What google appears to be doing now is attempting to pretend that neither supply nor demand exist at all.

The insanity of that must be fairly obvious?

Your demand for censorship encourages supply of censorship, so I guess we should throw you in jail.

All else equal, the difference is that taking drugs (may) harm the user, and only the user, while taking a slave obviously involves another person.

Good point. So there would be a set of things that infringe on others' rights, are therefore illegal and therefore support high profits, separate from those that don't infringe and could therefore be legalised.

You're that typical someone that chimes in with the worst possible thing that they imagine could happen if censorship is not enforced. Then when it's pointed out that censorship is still undesirable, that typical somone retorts "Well what if <horrible thing> happened to you/your mum/dog/gerbil?!".

There's a balance between being afraid of your own shadow and being reasonably careful/safe. Think about that.

Because I use a specific technique to highlight an issue implies nothing about 'me' except that I can use that technique. Your argument would be stronger if you focus on the issue, not the person.

You used the words "reasonably careful/safe", which I assume means you're not subscribing to an extremist position. Similarly, I don't hold an extremist position on this and am simply highlighting that there are grey areas that Google has to deal with. If it were easy, they'd have made an obvious decision years ago and wouldn't need to change it.

What if the first returned thing is the child pornography page on wikipedia and other news and resources on the subject? Doesn't have to return actual pics and videos. Yes it's still censorship of something but in this case instant search just doesn't auto complete to anything yet if you search for the term it will return the result list un filtered.

When I search for "torrent" on Google, the third result is The Pirate Bay, and when I search for "torren" The Pirate Bay is the first result, with a suggestion to correct the word to "torrent". Of course, as you may know, results are relative to the user profile Google builds about you.

     Throughout history, all episodes of censorship
     have been met with the response that the 
     material isn't REALLY censored

Citation needed. To me, a material is either forbidden or not forbidden. There are no gray areas.

Of course, smart governments that yield control in subtle ways, like the US government, have been using tactics like disinformation to hide the truth in a mountain of noise and I can see how Google could do the same thing. However this is not censorship.

You really want a citation for something that is obviously true? Of course in any censorship debate, there is someone that says "you can always get it through the underground, the black market, the fact that the ban isn't actively upheld, insert other similar reason". These folks are always around. Asking a citation to support that assertion is silly. Otherwise I ask you to cite support for your assertion that "a material is either forbidden or not forbidden". I'd like to point out we have courts deciding whether laws apply and whether something is forbidden or isn't covered by a specific law.

If it's so obviously true, then you should have no problem providing a citation, right? I wouldn't mind if you violated Godwin's law either :)

The reason why I'm asking for a citation is that I live in an ex-Communist country. I know how censorship looks like and it ain't nothing like what you describe.

    Otherwise I ask you to cite support for your assertion 
    that "a material is either forbidden or not forbidden"

Providing a citation for a personal opinion which I marked as such? Fine, I'll give you a famous example of real censorship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...

Related to that event, over a period of 15 years more than 130 journalists and Internet users have been jailed, including Internet webmaster Huang Qi that has been in jail since 3 June 2000 for having allowed articles about the Tiananmen Square massacre to be posted on his website, which was hosted in the United States after being initially banned in China.

    I'd like to point out we have courts deciding 
    whether laws apply and whether something is forbidden 
    or isn't covered by a specific law.

I also like to point out that your First Amendment does not refer to Google, being applicable only to the actions of your government. It's not within your right to distribute whatever information you want through a private media outlet. It is in your right however to distribute that information by yourself, as only the law can stop you.

So yes, thanks for pointing out the obvious - content is either forbidden or not forbidden.

"Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

I think the key word here is Suppression which doesn't have to be as extreme as in your example. Censorship is not a binary thing, it's on a scale. Simply using tactics to discourage something can be considered suppression in my view.

When a government institution or another controlling body yielding great influence coerces a media outlet into censoring something, even though that's not required by law, then I also consider that censorship. As such, I clearly consider the case of Wikileaks to be an example of a modern censorship attempt.

However, I also believe that the liberty of the press has to go both ways. A company should be free to deny the publishing of something, after all you can just start your own newspaper, or your own web engine that indexes content in this case, or whatever. It's not like your life is threatened, you just have to move your ass off your couch.

I think the issue in this thread is that you seem to only view something as censorship if the law/influence/whatever comes from the government.

> Of course in any censorship debate, there is someone that says "you can always get it through the underground, the black market, the fact that the ban isn't actively upheld, insert other similar reason".

What? In this discussion people said that Google is censoring information about torrents; but no-one has said "use a different search engine" because Google will return results about torrents, they just don't return the results using Google Instant.

"torrents" is just eight characters; even for a hunt'n'peck typist that's a few seconds before they hit [search].

But interestingly it does appear to lead to less google searches being performed for those keywords.

As to the affect this has upon actual visits to the sites in question, only they can say.

>you can always get it through the underground, the black market

"Having to press enter after typing your query" doesn't really count as descending into the black market in my eyes.

When google starts actually blocking tpb from its results across the board, rest assured that I'll be right there next to you, molotov in hand.

I think the problem people have with Google's control over the search results is that they (perhaps mistakenly) expect Google to be an impartial facilitator for accessing the world's information. It could be argued that organic placement of piratical content in autocomplete and instant searches is a desired outcome, as it shows the average person what's "out there" on the web. Removing actually-popular searches from the autocomplete and instant results is, in a way, lying about reality. People may be thinking, "If they're lying about this, what else aren't they telling us?"

From my perspective, if those of us arguing for things like shorter copyright terms are to have any success convincing the broader public (whose access to information is largely through the media conglomerates), maybe having those people accidentally stumble upon torrent sites when they search for their favorite movie or pop idol is a good thing.

Not because we want them to pirate the content, but because we want them to know that technology provides another way -- that there is a conceivable, technically possible existence that doesn't depend on a controlled feed of entertainment from the existing media players. If only they could experience the digital utopia that could be created if not for the impossibility of negotiating licenses, they might be willing to support a reform of copyright that is in the best long-term interests of society as a whole, both creators and customers.

> They have every right to do whatever the hell they want, within law, to make their business as successful as possible. If you don't like it, go use DuckDuckGo, or start your own engine. There's a public domain page index available now, have at it.

Google has built its business on other people's content, is that simple. But then it started to gradually "steal" more and more of said people work, until it became the giant corporation that you mention.

And before people start down-voting me, just imagine a giant like IBM (let's say) building a search engine that steals other people's content (because that's what things like Google Places have become) and then making tons of money on the back of it. Hell will break loose.

I agree that Places and other similar parts of google's business are highly ethically suspect, far more so than the user profiling and data retention that are more often talked about.

I don't understand how it's related to this particular issue though.

> I don't understand how it's related to this particular issue though.

Because when it first started I think there was a mutual, non-spoken agreement between web content-owners and Google, sort of "I give you our content for free to use it on your search engine and you bring me back visitors by trying to be impartial in your SERPs; but I don't expect you to compete against me, not now, not ever".

That didn't last long, to say the least, but said content owners are now prisoners of Google (yes, it's a big word, but that's the fact). If my personal experience counts, I let Googlebot crawl my website like crazy, at speed rates for which I would certainly ban any other potential search engine bots, and that's because Google brings in 98% of my search engine traffic. And I'm sure I'm not the only one banning strange-looking bots, which could belong to potential new, wonderful search engines, but which at this rate will never see the light of day.

And, unfortunately, things like DuckDuckGo are sub-optimal outside of the English sphere of influence, at least that's what I could see in my case.

If you want to build a search engine, there's no need to crawl the web. Just crawl Google. That's what Microsoft did.

The inequities of crawling are in my opinion a huge issue with the web that receives relatively little discussion.

If a majority of websites were to ban Googlebot, Google would be brought to its knees. Slowly.

Their index would go stale.

I like Google. But I do think crawling, who gets to do it and who does not is an underappreciated issue. Google is very lucky.

How are we blocking Googlebot? If we're using robots.txt then they can simply ignore it. Googlebot can begin to identify itself differently. There are a million ways to get around a Googlebot ban and I wouldn't be the guy who thinks he's smarter than Google. You'll lose that one. They'll find a way.

But anyway, this isnt really relevant. Can you tie it in for us?

Blocking is not done via robots.txt. It would more likely be IP-based.

Impossible to block Google? Probably true. But only because they have been allowed to grow so large as to be indefeasible. And the reason they've been able to do that is because of what the commenter said: websites allowed them to crawl, fast and hard, year after year. This is not true for all bots.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to the article and the specific issue. I don't disgree with what Google is doing in this case. And I understand why and where Google is headed.

The issue of who is allowed to crawl and who is not is something the commenter raised. It's a huge issue that people take for granted, in my opinion.

I'm guessing the reason this was downvoted was the first paragraph. It was meant as sarcasm. Bing fans on HN I did not expect.

I don't know what the problem with that would be. I would love to at least try out a Watson search engine.

Hmm, how is this any worse than reddit or stumbleupon or delicious "profiting" from sharing everyone else's content? It's just reorganizing the information that is already available?

I think we are reaching a point in history where giant corporations are reaching a state-like status where corporate policy begins to have the weight of law in the sense of how many people are affected by it outside the company; corporate public relations and agenda becomes diplomacy with several different states, concerning different interests for the parties involved.

Not that these things weren't true when the corporations started, but as they scale, so does the influence and responsbaility.

It reminds me of the old Cyberpunk 2020 rpg book where corporations have they own law, police, etc.

I agree.

To keep the discussion going, how would you feel if in the future, Google removed the "offending" sites from it's index entirely?

Do you mean offensive sites in general or just these file sharing sites?

For torrent sites I think I'd be pissed. I'm no fan of piracy and I'm not an apologist for those sites at all but I don't think it's Google's place to do that. Google's mission is to index and organize the world's information and blacklisting websites like that would be hypocrisy. Even if we all agreed it was okay for one site it becomes a slippery slope where Google can use that for their own or their partners' benefit. There'd be an exodus and Google would slowly lose market share from that point on.

It's one thing to stop making it so easy to find a site that you barely have to type 2 letters before you get what you want. Its an entirely different thing to limit access to certain sites. If its not on Google then it doesn't exist on the Internet for all intents and purposes. We're back to emailing each other links in that case.

This should be as far as Google reaches on this short of banning these sites. From there it's the job of users to stop supporting piracy and law enforcement to shut down illegal sites in their own jurisdictions using the current laws and without creating new laws to prosecute people unless it's absolutely positively necessary.

It's interesting you point out it would be a "slippery slope" to be on.

It isn't a hard stretch to imagine in the future, you need to turn safeSearch off to see them in search results. Sometime further in the future you'll need to add some other preference or something to see them. Then, you'll need to be logged in and have a "verified" account. Then....

I think it's safe to say Google are well and truly on the slope of slipperiness.

Where is there a public domain index?

I'm with Jonnie here. This whole outrage is ludicrous. This is like NAMBLA throwing a hissy fit over Google not showing suggestions for search terms like "kiddie p0rn".

Like he said, the results are still there, just not the autocomplete. And stealing content? Where? A music service isn't a radical new idea and I'm sure they could have just as easily done it whether they stole content or not.

This is a for profit company. There's money to be made and I really don't see anything unethical about their new Music service. You want to talk about stealing?! Let's talk about the sites moaning about Google not autocompleting queries that are likely looking for pirated material. Now those sites are stealing. The disgusting thing about them is that they want to hide behind "freedom" and "censorship" as a way to distract or even excuse what they do.

I'm just shocked at how many people feel theyre entitled to free music, movies, software, you name it! You're not entitled to shit. I often wonder how many of those same people are in business for themselves. I'd venture to guess not many at all.

Make no mistake here, censorship, SOPA, Protect IP are all bad things. But websites that obviously, actively, and often openly break copyright laws cannot be taken seriously when we talk about freedom and censorship. It's like the KKK hiding behind the bible to support bigotry or politicians hiding behind Patriotism to pass the Patriot Act. By using those things as shields you're essentially shitting on the very thing you say you value so much.

Copyright laws have been on the books since before the web and while there's a point to be made about some parts of those laws going too far, the simple concepts of creators being able to defend themselves against the unauthorized distribution (theft) of their creations is something we should all be able to get behind. If we can't then I had better get out of the programming business because sooner or later my own colleagues will be diving for the freedom to be able to hijack and give away what I create for any price they want without any permission from me.

I upvoted you and I agree with what you're saying.

However, while copyright itself is an economically and morally valid concept, the current copyright law is not.

It's simply not OK for copyright protections to last for 100 years (and growing, as long as Disney is still around), when something like 10 years should be enough. It's also not OK to sue parents for singing Happy Birthday to their child in a 20 secs YouTube video. I also don't think it's OK to sue anybody for singing a song, unless he does it for commercial purposes. It's also not OK to demand tens of thousands of dollars for a single song you downloaded illegally. Or to sue children or grandmas.

Another problem is that sharing is in human nature. If you can't find a way around that (like putting a tax in every Internet connection that should take care of any illegal song or movie downloads) than it's also unjust to punish people for doing something which is in their nature (it's like punishing people for having sex).

It's not that copyright is unjust. The concept is OK, the authors need to live too. But they went way too far (and not for the benefit of the authors ;))

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