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Google played a key role in helping shoot down the U.S. government's proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, earlier this year. The entertainment industry supported the act. Now Google seems to be throwing the industry a bone—by threatening to give poor search-result rankings to sites accused of violating copyright claims.
Google calculates search engine results using a complicated algorithm that factors in more than 200 different pieces of criteria, called "signals." The newest signal is "valid copyright removal notices" that accuse a site of hosting or linking to pirated songs, videos or other content. Now the more of these notices a Web page gets, the less likely anyone is to ever find it. Google has received more than 4.5 million such notices in the past month alone.
Google's move is a compromise. Copyright holders still have to prove their content has been pirated, and the courts still have the power to make Google take down Web pages that infringe on those copyrights. But the new strategy means that simply being accused of piracy is enough for a site to rank poorly when someone does a Google search.
—Larry Greenemeier
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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6 Comments
Add Commentthis makes as much sense as being able to report highway littering, even if there was no occurrence of it. out there, you can call in and say anything you want without proof of it happening.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisValid copyright removal notices is good. If you can't get to the web site, how do you buy their product easily.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCome on Bops, you're a human, I'm a human, the people who operate web sites are human, the result? There will be a workaround!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGoogle's search results now, officially, stink.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid a search last night. First twenty results? Same site.
Busy with all the endless crap they are throwing against the wall, google has lost the ability to deliver superior search results.
Terribly researched -- and therefore coming to a 100% false conclusion. Thanks for the misinformation Scientific American!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'Valid copyright notices' notice the word 'valid' -- this means that a mere accusation isn't enough: the accusation also has to be deemed 'valid'.
I agree with your point. "VALID copyright removal notices" is not resulted by "simply being accused of piracy". Otherwise how to avoid malicious accusation?
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