Another week, another entertainment industry body attacking Google for not doing more to fight piracy through its search engine.
This time it’s film industry body the MPAA, reacting waspishly to a blog post last week by Google’s legal director Fred Von Lohmann about the number of copyright removal requests it’s processing – and its decision to publish more details about the URLs it does and doesn’t remove as a result.
“As policymakers evaluate how effective copyright laws are, they need to consider the collateral impact copyright regulation has on the flow of information online,” wrote Lohmann.
“When we launched the copyright removals feature, we received more than 250,000 requests per week. That number has increased tenfold in just six months to more than 2.5 million requests per week today… By making our copyright data available in detail, we hope policymakers will be able to see whether or not laws are serving their intended purpose and being enforced in the public interest.”
The MPAA’s SVP Content Protection, Internet, Marc Miller, took to the organisation’s blog to hit back. “Google’s reading of the data in the blog post accompanying the announcement is missing some critical perspective: if the process is cumbersome for Google, it is even more cumbersome for the creators and makers who must constantly be on the lookout to protect their work from theft,” he wrote.
“There is a staggering amount of copyright infringement taking place every day online and much of it is facilitated by Google, as their own data shows.”
The arguments will be familiar to the music industry, where the BPI has regularly made similar criticisms, most recently over the speed at which Google is introducing its promised downgrading of piracy sites in its search rankings.
And so 2012 ends as it began. Google is an important partner for the entertainment industries through YouTube, Android and its music services. Yet it’s also a villain in the eyes of industry bodies, not least because it has more cloud with the “policymakers” referred to by Von Lohmann than they do.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…
Google is complaining about 10 million takedowns a month! They can process trillions of searches a day. In our opinion, they created the problem by illegally profiting from abusing copyright law. Google and the ISPs are going to have to start processing hundreds of millions of copyright infringement notices a month. There business model is based on unfairly leveraging content that they do not pay for. They will still make billions even after they actually start obeying the law. In our opinion, they created the situation where 20% of all US internet traffic is used by p2p and cyberlocker pitracy. We believe Google literally taught people how to pirate by autompleting megaupload, torrent, and the pirate bay after every recording artist and movie title for almost a decade. ISPs helped by not following 17 USC 512 (i) and terminating repeat infringers. Youtube/Google who made $14b in the last 12 months in profit, never paid a dime to a content creator before they got sued by Viacom.