Google's Opaque New Policy Lets Rightsholders Dictate Search Results
eff.org
eff.org
The RIAA/MPAA claim that demoting copyright-infringing search results in Google will reduce piracy. This assumes that there's some large group of people using Google (or Bing, or Blekko, etc) to find pirated media. I don't see how that is plausible, given that the actual search results for pirated media are almost entirely scams and malware.
The EFF is concerned that demoting sites which generate many DMCA notices will muffle free speech. A hypothetical situation is:
1. A site hosts user-uploaded video, and refuses to comply with takedown notices.
2. User Alice uploads an expose of government misconduct, and user Bob uploads a few hundred pirated movies.
3. Google receives DMCA notices to remove links to the pirated movies from their index.
4. Alice's expose is now ranked lower in search results.
While this situation is theoretically possible, it seems unlikely. All of the major hosting sites I know of (for video, audio, text, blobs) respond to DMCA notices themselves, and therefore aren't targets for search-engine takedowns.
(conflict of interest disclaimer: I work for Google, though not on this project)
> Takedown requests are nothing more than accusations of
> copyright infringement. No court or other umpire confirms
> that the accusations are valid (although copyright owners
> can be liable for bad-faith accusations).
There are. Tens to hundreds of millions of them, probably.
E.g. "Watch Game of Thrones" vs "learn to dance":
Google suggests I check these popular searches too:
* watch game of thrones megavideo
* watch game of thrones episode 1
* watch game of thrones tvduck
* watch game of thrones tv links
* watch game of thrones episode 2
* watch game of thrones episode 3
* watch game of thrones episode 8
* watch game of thrones season 2 episode 1 online free
I don't think they were looking for the link to subscribe to HBO.
Admittedly, Wikipedia's article on the subject is relatively poor, so I could be wrong. But filing a counter-notice seems a lot like going out in your backyard and whacking that wasp nest with your baseball bat. Maybe it will all work out, but probably not.
Here is a classic example of how the DMCA takedown process works in real life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_signing_key_c...
Ahem: "intitle:"index.of"(mpg(avi)wmv) (words you're looking for) -html -htm -php -asp -jsp
Would this be affected by the new policy? I don't know. I was shown this by a modern young-un--didn't know it myself.
There's also a problem with flow of information; if your provider takes down something under the DMCA, they inform you, so you know about the (possibly frivolous) claim.
I don't see how Google could make any reasonable guarantee to be able to inform the affected parties -- neither the author/user that publish, nor necessarily the various admins and providers that would be affected (Think shared hosting, shared domain, community message board...).
But somehow I doubt YouTube will be "demoted" as apparently other sites will be. In fact YouTube has a special position in the top bar of Google products, even better than a search result. Does anyone think Google will be removing it from there? If not, it's clearly unfair to demote any other site that competes with YouTube (or doesn't, for that matter - what's fair should be fair).
1) YouTube acts on DMCA notices, so there's no need to separately file notices against their search results
2) YouTube has given every major content provider access to internal systems to flag content and have it disabled immediately without human intervention
3) A proper DMCA notice creates some liability (penalty of perjury and all), where pressing a button in YouTube's content flagging system creates none, so the internal system is both practically and legally preferable to sending DMCA notices
> 1) YouTube acts on DMCA notices
Exactly - YouTube receives a ton of takedown notices, and acts on them. Those are grounds for demotion in search results now according to the new policy.
The new ranking signal is the number of DMCA notices sent to Google for each site, not the number of DMCA notices the site is sent. Google receives DMCA notices to remove search results pointing to infringing content. Google receives these notices primarily for sites that are outside the US and would ignore DMCA notices sent to them directly. They would not receive any significant number for YouTube videos because YouTube handles infringement directly; there's no reason to send a second notice to Google to pull the search listing.
(I'm aware Google owns YouTube. That does not change anything.)
> sites that have a “high number of removal notices” of takedown notices that result in actual takedowns will show up lower in some search results,
That means that complying with the takedown notices is exactly what gets you demoted. Which means that this is directly relevant to YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
The logic seems to be, if you have a lot of valid takedown notices sent to you, you must have a lot of infringing content. Which is true. And YouTube does have tons of infringing content, people upload copyrighted music all the time.
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/08/an-update-to-our-se...
https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...
https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...
Based on those numbers, neither are likely to be impacted by this, but you appear to want google to actually treat youtube differently (using "don't host this" instead of "don't return a link for this" as a signal).
Possibly the answer is 0, so 5x more is still 0. And that would be ok.
But if the answer is anything other than 0, and YouTube is not demoted more than Vimeo, then that is different treatment.
Of course the problem is that we don't see what goes into search results, so we won't see these demotions. If we see Vimeo ranked lower than YouTube, it could be for other reasons. And given the extremely strong position of google.com, this is exactly the issue.
Compare that to the top of the list, filestube.com, which receives almost 700 complaints per week and has a total of over sixty thousand complaints.
I would hope that this update would not affect either YouTube or Vimeo, or any other domain with such a vanishingly small number of complaints.
However, what if in a year copyright holders decide that sending takedowns directly to google.com is better for some reason? (Due for example to some technical legal matter.) Do you honestly think that if that happened, Google would demote YouTube?
That's the conflict of interest, and it's the first big issue here.
The second big issue is that there are lots of takedowns for YouTube. They just go to YouTube currently and not to Google directly. But if the principle of the matter were valid - if a site that had a lot of actual takedown notices, i.e., evidence that infringing content goes up on them, were a site worthy of demotion - then in principle, it should not matter where the takedowns go. It is their existence that matters. But they are being ignored for the biggest content uploading site on the web, YouTube, owned by Google - making the demotion of any site that ends up demoted by this new policy highly ironic.
One of the arguments against Mega was they affiliated with these sites and knowingly paid these indexing sites lots of money for referring new customers who paid to watch or download pirated content on MegaVideo and MegaUpload.
They all pay lip service to the DMCA but their entire business model is to hold content just long enough to entice people to pay to access it or the next upload of it.
Really though I think the link sites are going to be the real losers in this action rather than the actual video sites, if you go to google and search for 'watch <any tv show or movie>' you'll see a lot of intermediary link sites competing for that traffic.
Takedown notices sent to google.com about YouTube versus ones sent directly to YouTube using YouTube's existing mechanism are both takedown notices. If one demotes you, so should the other. But Google has a clear conflict of interest here.
When a site receives a takedown notice, if it complies, then the content will actually be removed from the internet. From the point of view of the notice's submitter, this is the best outcome.
If the site doesn't comply, then a notice can be submitted to search engines to de-list the site. The content is still available, still infringing, it's just fractionally more difficult to find.
If Google demoted sites for complying with notices, it would be a very powerful reason for those sites to stop complying.
Given that, I imagine that copyright holders file takedowns where it has the quickest effect, either directly to the site or to google.com. But this is just a technical difference. It seems odd that it should affect search rankings, and it feel more wrong given that Google owns a major target of takedown notifications, so this isn't just Google objectively settings things in order - it has a huge inherent interest and bias here.
Personally, I think this is a mistake by Google. No reason I can think of makes sense - this won't appease content holders for long.
And that is what is wrong here. Google is treating websites it owns in a special way, promoting them in google.com results unfairly compared to the competition.
> But that Perez Hilton video listing would get removed
> via the web search takedown system, as there is no
> Google Video removal. The YouTube one, as I’ve
> explained, would fall under the YouTube removal system.
Further down the page, he includes a quote from Google which directly refutes the thesis of his article, but then says it must be a straight-up lie because it doesn't agree with his misconceptions about how the internet works.
They must have something special, as they get to dictate how things work legally, and extra-legally.
Am i being unreasonable in thinking this use of inflationary language is wrong?
If morally you're on the right side of the argument, which i believe the EFF is, then you must play everything completely straight and by the book - otherwise you just give up your advantage.
What language do we reserve for the really bad things.
They can choose to whom they send DMCA notices so all other ranking factors being equal they will have the ability to decide which results go higher than others.
And this IS a really bad thing as it the equivalent to online censorship.
Get 3 false claims in YouTube's internal process (being unreliable I believe is most useful as a state of the systems used by a source, I would use the data I have on false claims from "rights holders" as a way to judge if they are reliable) in a quarter and no influence is given to your claims of knowing what is infringing and just being an abuser of the "rights" system. Most of the big media seem like they would get bounced by this as they seem to flag all sorts of stuff improperly.
Again, I would just not do this at all. But if I was told to do it, then I would want to have very strict measures to avoid using "advice" (claims by big content of infringement) from extremely unreliable sources.
A benefit of setting up a system that punished false claims is to make those currently spewing out false claims find ways to be accurate. Currently there seems to be no reason not to just claim tons of stuff that you have no right to claim (and it seems there are even incentives in the system to do so - YouTube starts sharing revenue with you on the video you claim). And if they didn't become more accurate then at least not mess up search results by treating the poor signals they provide as trustworthy.
This move is going to give google some serious brownie points with the content providers though, which is a good thing for all of us because it means that good content might become more accessible legally.
If a result is (wrongly) pushed off the first page, much less down to the 3rd or 4th, it may as well not be there for almost all users. That, combined with Google's dominant position in search means that pages may well effectively be erased from the internet as far as many users are concerned.
Google definitely seems to be on the path of "Big Brother" and I don't like it.
Also, for the GP: bing is not the sole backend source for DDG.
The only thing I can argue here is that they may be doing it to receive fewer takedown requests in Google Search. But I'm not defending them, as that probably isn't the case.
Google needs a cosy relationship with MPAA/RIAA so they can sell content through the YouTube and Play Stores.
Also if I want to buy some fruit and search for Apple, well can see how that works. The internet is open to all and more people eat apples than will ever own a iApple device. Not best example given it uses apples, but is easy to use as an example when you compare searching for apple over a pear. With that you can see how rightsholders factored into search results can play out. Currently search's bias to towards a geek bias and thats fine for us geek. Though it does put of non geeks who might want to buy and apple and not have the search engine kung-fu to see past the rightsholder layers they will encounter and as such shape there mindset. Think I'll like this to milking sheep and whilst this wont effect me or you, it will effect many and they wont even know it, bah.
The thing is that most reasonably web-savvy people will bypass Google and use a torrent search site or "free-episodes-blah-blah.com" site to find what they want.
If the MPAA/RIAA were not dinosaurs lobbyists running a massive fraud campaign, they should look at how sidereel.com is organized. Featured (legal and sometimes non-free) content shows up first, and then the other sites show up second.
Fuck titles, man.