Google's Opaque New Policy Lets Rightsholders Dictate Search Results

I don't understand the arguments of either side in this debate.<p>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.<p>The EFF is concerned that demoting sites which generate many DMCA notices will muffle free speech. A hypothetical situation is:<p>1. A site hosts user-uploaded video, and refuses to comply with takedown notices.<p>2. User Alice uploads an expose of government misconduct, and user Bob uploads a few hundred pirated movies.<p>3. Google receives DMCA notices to remove links to the pirated movies from their index.<p>4. Alice's expose is now ranked lower in search results.<p>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.<p>(conflict of interest disclaimer: I work for Google, though not on this project)<p><pre><code> &#62; Takedown requests are nothing more than accusations of &#62; copyright infringement. No court or other umpire confirms &#62; that the accusations are valid (although copyright owners &#62; can be liable for bad-faith accusations). </code></pre> Isn't this incorrect? Under the DMCA, recipients of a takedown notice can file a counter-notice stating that the material is not infringing. From there, further actions involve the court system.

This is particularly ironic since it is <i>Google</i> - owner of YouTube. YouTube is by far the site with the largest amount of infringing content, and the largest amount of takedown requests.<p>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).

What is this new class of nobility entitled "Rightsholders"?<p>They must have something special, as they get to dictate how things work legally, and extra-legally.

"Dictate". I understand policy holders can now influence but not dictate results.<p>Am i being unreasonable in thinking this use of inflationary language is wrong?<p>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.<p>What language do we reserve for the <i>really</i> bad things.

It does seem to be a bad idea to me. If you had to implement it I would institute a very harsh signal for takedown requests that are proven false.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Everybody seems to be looking at this a little too negatively. 'Demoting' is ultimately a meaningless thing - google does not specify how much the algorithm is going to penalize these sites, just that they will. And they aren't going to make anything disappear from the internet, TPB will still be there and you can still search for content from the TPB homepage. Is it really a big deal if a google search for game of thrones returns the HBO site before a torrent site?<p>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.

DuckDuckGo must be loving this change.<p>Google definitely seems to be on the path of "Big Brother" and I don't like it.

What I don't get about this change is why. I maybe OK if they did these change saying that users want to find content from webpages with mostly legal content, or that content from those website almost always have better quality. But this is not the case here.<p>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.

Sounds a bit like patent trolls for search results in many ways.<p>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.

Google could make this more transparent, and put a note on the search results, "3 sites in these results are down-rated due to excessive DMCA notices received"<p>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.<p>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.

I submitted a post about this a few hours back. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370224" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370224</a>

I'm literally here to bitch about how fucking inflammatory this title is.<p>Fuck titles, man.