MPAA Kicks KickassTorrents Off Google With ‘Precision’ Takedown | Hacker News Reader

MPAA Kicks KickassTorrents Off Google With ‘Precision’ Takedown

torrentfreak.com

49 pointsllambda11 comments

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Am I the only one who skips web search engines and heads straight to torrent search when searching for torrent?

My favorite at the moment is torrentz.eu

The more authorities try to clean up search engines, the nmore people would learn.

Yeah, right. I cant remember the last time I used google or any other search engine for torrents.

Seem odd to me though that google can search torrents it's self....

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=003849996876419856805:erhhdbygr...

... if tottents are so evil.

Actually, torrents themselves are totally legal. For example I can make a torrent of a photo I took or something which I own the copyright to. I can even then upload my legit torrent to The Pirate Bay or other torrent websites.

This is why bit torrent clients like Vuze are totally legal and also why Google wouldn't prevent torrents themselves to be searched for.

Google is still pretty good for illegal torrents. Just go right to the 'this link removed due to DMCA request' entries, and follow the link to the DMCA request. You'll see a nice index of URLs where you might find what you are looking for.

Partially related, does anyone understand how chilling effects can host that index of links (within the DMCA notice), whereas Google cannot supply the links individually? Or how Google linking to right where you can find the removed linked is more legal than just having the link themselves.

I just use pirate bay, mainly for the comments.

If you want comments, try kickass.to - they have a much nicer interface, and I seem to see more comments. Pirate Bay still has more material though....

It appears that all they did was include kickass.to as one of the infringing URLs (presumeably because the kickass homepage includes links directly to the torrent files next to the links for the subpages for the torrent files). You can see the takedown letter if you search for kickass.to and click on the chilling effects link: http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=1009127

I'm actually surprised that doesn't happen in many more takedown notices, as it seems like an easy way to knock torrent/streaming site homepages off of google, and many of these sites (the torrent ones, at least) usually have a "newest torrents" list on the homepage.

This still works though: https://encrypted.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&q=a+good+day+to...

I know the OP is intentionally leaving the irony unsaid because it's so obvious...but of course, the technique described here is anything but "precision"...the MPAA is apparently able to list just a few offending URLs to convince Google to take down an entire domain..."precision" takedowns would be sending off thousands of specific URLs to infringing content.

In other words, they're apparently able to invoke the index-ban-hammer in the way that SOPA was meant to let them (had it passed).

So if they registered a different domain and used that one instead, would Google's "ban" follow them, or does the MPAA have to go through the whole process again?

Ooh, thanks. I didn't know about this one.

IIRC, Google was having problems with licensing some content from media cos on Google Play (?), and then it was solved...as long as Google http://readwrite.com/2011/01/27/google_starts_to_censor_torr...

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