I don't understand the arguments of either side in this debate.
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).
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.
"Watch XYZ" does not mean anything since a studio can legally stream their own content. For example: Google "Watch Southpark" and the first result will be from southparkstudios.com. People simply want to watch a certain show online and it doesn't matter to them if its legal or illegal as long as they get to watch it.
The counter-notice process is somewhat dangerous, and is not something to be undertaken without a budget for legal representation. From what I've read on Wikipedia, there are basically two options for the original takedown sender: ignore the counter-notice for 10 days (at which case the disputed content can be put back up), or file a lawsuit against the infringer in federal court.
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.
Is the caveat in #1 actually required? As I understand it, there's nothing in the DMCA requiring that a copyright holder file a takedown notice with the site before they file one with Google, since those are independent. They could file one with Google for the search results first, or they could file the notices simultaneously. That would result in sites being demoted even if they do comply with takedown notices, because under Google's new policy they'd be demoted just by the fact of Google having received DMCA notices.
I don't see how you can be confident of this: Look at how youtube handles allegations of copyright infringement.
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...).
This is particularly ironic since it is Google - owner of YouTube. YouTube is by far the site with the largest amount of infringing content, and the largest amount of takedown requests.
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).
Why would YouTube be the largest target of takedown requests?
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
> Why would YouTube be the largest target of takedown requests?
> 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.
You're confused. Google does not know what sites are receiving DMCA notices. They have no omniscience of communication between content creators and websites they don't own. They will not be taking into account notices sent directly to YouTube or any other site in ranking search results.
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.)
Most web-sites don't have ContentID - there are companies that scrape the web to find potentially infringing content and file DMCA complaints on content-owners' behalf. It's much cheaper to just hit Google and a big few like Youtube rather than customize a bot for every site that handles DMCA takedowns.
Which video-hosting services do you think will be demoted? Every major one (YouTube, Vimeo, LiveLeak, etc) comply with the DMCA, so they're unlikely to have links removed from Google's search results.
> 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.
And according to that language, YouTube should be demoted quite a lot - we know it receives tons of takedown notices. Just search for any copyrighted video in history, it's on YouTube.
You keep repeating the same point, which is confusing. How is this any different than Google is treating vimeo? Google is not looking at the number of takedown requests companies file with vimeo (they can't, in fact, takedown notices are AFAIK only public record if they proceed to a court case (companies that publish to chillingeffects do so voluntarily)), so they're only using the number of takedown requests they receive to remove search results linking to videos on vimeo. That's the same as youtube.
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).
YouTube has 5x more requests there than Vimeo. So it seems like it should be demoted 5x more?
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.
According to the links, YouTube receives two complaints per week, compared to one per week for Vimeo. The total number of complaints is 251 and 56, respectively.
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.
It does seem then that it will not currently target YouTube or Vimeo, good point.
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.
The sites that host all the content found on sites like tvlinks.co.uk, surfthechannel.com - those have been shut down but they were link directories of movies and tv shows making bank on ad impressions and referral fees funneling traffic to the videos hosted on other sites.
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.
It depends on what takedowns they mean - if it's those to the site itself or those targeted at Google Search. I don't see how could they detect the former in other sites, and Youtube probably doesn't get much of the latter.
But the point is, there is no meaningful difference between the two.
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.
I see your point, but practically speaking, for most people removing from google.com is removing from the internet. You can't visit what you can't find. So there isn't a fundamental difference between the two types of takedown requests given the dominance of a single search engine.
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.
It's hard to tell exactly how it will affect YouTube, especially since we don't know how it affects results at all. I suspect the deciding factor will be how google knows about the takedown requests, since it will almost certainly treat YouTube specially. Furthermore, it's possible that YouTube is linked so much that the DMCA requests have a negligible effect.
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.
> It's hard to tell exactly how it will affect YouTube, especially since we don't know how it affects results at all. I suspect the deciding factor will be how google knows about the takedown requests, since it will almost certainly treat YouTube specially.
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.
I'm usually a fan of Google, but I would love for them to get into real anti-trust trouble over not demoting Youtube, too, and getting forced to demote it because of the stupid decision they took themselves about downgrading sites based on DMCA notices. It would be something very satisfying about seeing this backfire against them.
That article is misleading, I believe intentionally so.
> 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.
The video he mentions is hosted on perezhilton.com, which has instructions at http://perezhilton.com/copyright-statement for requesting a copyright takedown. There is no reason to request its removal from Google unless perezhilton.com refused to comply with the request, which seems unlikely.
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.
"Dictate". I understand policy holders can now influence but not dictate results.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its search backend, so it's had this behavior for a while now. To find a general-purpose search engine that doesn't comply with the DMCA, you'll have to use Yandex, Baidu, or other foreign-hosted services.
well, we have no idea what bing does with them. As far as I know, bing doesn't even publish the requests they get to chillingeffects or any where else, let alone publish what they do with them.
Also, for the GP: bing is not the sole backend source for DDG.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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)
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.