Effective reading....
Just replace "We" with "Our paymasters" in the quotes and you'll pretty much have the truth of it.
Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has harshly criticised the government and Google in a report into the UK's creative industries. The MPs want the 2010 Digital Economy Act - which cracks down on downloaders of pirated material and other copyright infringers - activated without further delay. And the panel …
It is relatively easy to remove sites offering 'naked kiddies' or whatever the term du jour is, as ALL these sites are illegal. Not so easy when the search term is 'Justin Bieber' (but by all means remove all of these too, especially the ones belonging to RIAA members).
"Would be just as easy to block "justin bieber never say never torrent"."
...and useless, because if it caused a problem, they'd be t0rrents, or torents, or trnts, or rapids, or... or...
The Chinese government already spends oodles of time uselessly playing whack-a-mole like that - around the Tienanmen Square anniversary, the ad-hoc shorthand people used to get around the filters evolved so rapidly that they ended up blocking searches for rubber ducks. It gets broader and broader and more and more ridiculous every time around; IIRC they came close to the point of censoring florists due to discussion of the Arab Spring. Get it? Revolution = spring, spring = flower, flower = florist?
So what happens when you do this kind of thing is that the people pirating music still get their Bieber but the garden supply industry suffers a 15% year-on-year revenue drop.
Not a winning policy.
But the thing is, the same things you describe can be used by CP flingers to get around censors, yet Google appears to be much more aggressive in closing those links than they are in closing piracy rings. So it DOES smack of a double standard. Unless Google can explain clearly what's so different about CP that they can clamp those down and not pirates, they'll be looking like a Janus.
What's different about CP?
1) It's always illegal. It's not like the issue is that people are stealing it instead of taking the moral high road and signing up for, like, a CP streaming service, or something.
B) There's a lot less CP than Bieber out there (or at least, I would hope so... I mean, kinda, but... well, you know what I mean).
III) It stands to reason that the people who are trading CP a lot probably make more effort to hide their tracks already, so the only ones that show up on Google to begin with are already morons as well as bastards, and have probably made a lot of other mistakes too.
0000100) If Google finds a forum that's 80% normal stuff and 20% people linking to music torrents in some thread, or whatever, and delists it, there'll be hell to pay, because there will be plenty of people who will step up and say, hey, you don't take down the whole forum because of this. At the very least it'll be a pain in the ass for Google. But if there's a forum that's 80% normal stuff and 20% CP, nobody's going to stand up and be like, "Hey, it's not so bad around here as long as you avoid the child molesters!". The odds of encountering PR or legal complications when delisting sites that would prefer anonymity anyway are a lot lower than for normal things, I would think.
@Tom 7
I've scanned in banknotes before - maybe its just the (more expensive?) copiers that are the problem.
I think the problem comes when you try and print them. Some bright spark realised pretty early on how important it would be to keep the lid on fake notes and got everyone to sign up.
"I think the problem comes when you try and print them. Some bright spark realised pretty early on how important it would be to keep the lid on fake notes and got everyone to sign up."
And how did they convince the firms operating outside the country? Import restrictions? What about international bank note copying (copying notes from another country and then moving them over there)? What if there's a note re-issue (the US now refreshes notes $5 and greater every few years).
I think they should read again the company's mission statement. Not the thing about evil; the one about making the world's information universally and easily accessible.
Not showing things that are on the web goes directly against everything Google does; it's understandable that they are not trying hard to shoot themselves in the foot.
If Google couldn't be used to search for pirated stuff then it's obvious that a big chunk of their advertising revenue will disappear. As the ultimate non-creator of content they have zero interest in protecting other peoples'. In fact they rely entirely on putting people through to the work of others, legit or not.
So why don't Google block infringing websites?
Probably because it's not their place to determine what is and isn't legal and if they started acting that way there would be a huge uproar.
Also there's the fact they make a lot of advertising revenue serving those results so driving pirates to someone else's search engine would lose them a small fortune.
Wasn't there something mentioned when they started blocking kiddy porn that the system wouldn't be used to block other things?
Not to mention, copyright laws are different in every country. You're asking them to enforce a mix of criminal and civil laws with multiple interpretations across multiple jurisdictions.
That's going to be so simple to do...
And it's still only desirable if you're an entity with a vested interest in a prescriptive reading of the current legal systems, which is a hugely minority position.
"Not to mention, copyright laws are different in every country. You're asking them to enforce a mix of criminal and civil laws with multiple interpretations across multiple jurisdictions."
Can't the same be said about CP laws? After all, there are differing ages of consent and differing attitudes toward the practice. It's not like there's a universal standard here, either.
"Can't the same be said about CP laws? After all, there are differing ages of consent and differing attitudes toward the practice."
I'm not a lawyer (thank goodness), but bizarrely, my recollection is that consent for *photographs* is almost universally 18, regardless of the age of consent for sex. I think there are plenty of states in the US where the AOC is 16 (can't say it's ever come up for me... uh...) but that doesn't change CP laws. So you can have sex with her and it's hunky dory, but if you take a picture you're a monster. :P
Part of the thing with CP is that people get really irrational about it, and it becomes politically untenable to support any reform, even if it's common sense stuff like, "Hey, maybe a 17-year-old girl who takes a naked selfie isn't in the same category as a greasy sleazebag who grooms 10-year-olds and sells photos online".
People will speak out when copyright stuff is crazy, but not so much for CP. So even if Google or whoever *is* blocking stuff that's perfectly legal in some jurisdictions, nobody's gonna raise hell about it - I mean, think about it: You live in a state where the AOC is 16; are you going to put your name on a petition suggesting that it should be legal for 16-year-olds to do porn? Maybe that'd be better than advocating looser copyright laws if all your neighbors were Andrew Orlowski clones, but not in the real world...
"I'm not a lawyer (thank goodness), but bizarrely, my recollection is that consent for *photographs* is almost universally 18, regardless of the age of consent for sex. I think there are plenty of states in the US where the AOC is 16 (can't say it's ever come up for me... uh...) but that doesn't change CP laws. So you can have sex with her and it's hunky dory, but if you take a picture you're a monster. :P"
You assume the laws and customs are the same everywhere you go. Consider, until recently a girl could appear nude in Germany's Bravo Magazine as early as 14. Even now, it's still only 16 where other countries can insist on 18 or even 20. Which shows some countries take a looser stance on the subject (and it's not considered a big thing by the populace) as long as it's known the participants are willing. And last I checked, standards and customs in Asian countries can be even more varied.
So, like copyright, you have a problem of conflicting standards. And that doesn't address the issue that if copyright dodgers can change their names, use codewords, and so on to hide from Google, why can't the CP'ers do the same thing: turn the business into a game of Whack-A-Mole while hiding out in countries that won't extradite for CP?
We do not believe it to be beyond the wit of the engineers employed by Google and others to demote and, ideally, remove copyright-infringing material from search engine results. Google co-operates with law enforcement agencies to block child pornographic content from search results and it has provided no coherent, responsible answer as to why it cannot do the same for sites which blatantly, and illegally, offer pirated content.
Removal of copyright-infringing sites is not difficult.
Identifying which sites actually infringe copyright is incredibly difficult. Google has taken a very responsible position here in that they don't simply rely on the purported rights-holder's allegation, but instead do some work to verify the situation before acting. This is a necessary check, as copyright holders have shown that they have no qualms about abusing takedown requests.
This is a very different situation than illegal pornography: in that case the takedown requestor is the authority. As much as they would like to be, copyright owners are not the authority on what infringes their IP. They have shown repeatedly that when given such authority, they abuse it.
To put forth this parallel without acknowledging this very obvious distinction belies these politicians' true motivations.
"We are deeply concerned ... could cause irreversible damage to the creative sector on which the United Kingdom’s future prosperity will significantly depend," the MPs warn.
If our future prosperity significantly depends on Harry Potter and the latest X-Factor pop, then we are indeed truly fucked.
and Google are not the only search engine. Although I'd be quite happy if our elected representatives believed they were.
What about Yahoo! ? Bing ? Not sure if Magellan or Altavista still exist, but this could be a great incentive for their revival.
Or - heaven forfend - what if a bunch of people donated some CPU time to a crowdsourced search engine with a distributed database. Try and shut *that* down ....
Altavista was closed earlier this year, IIRC, some time after being eventually bought indirectly by Yahoo!.
As for your distributed search engine idea, that has potential flaws. It's like with Freenet, things can drop off the map, plus there may be ways to attack the infrastructure or poison the results.
1 - while we are doing our best to put in place the legal framework so everyone can benefit from the t'net and t'web it would be wonderful if google would support us. We cannot do it on our own and need other partners to help us.
2 - (well anything would be better than what MPs seem to be doing - sounding off sounds so much like sounding off whereas looking for solutions seems a whole lot better?)
So why doesn't the British government build their own search engine, then install a country-wide firewall that blocks access to Google and redirects that traffic to the new British firewall? That way your government can tightly control the search results you guys get.
Just an idea, probably bad...
Actually, I suspect this is what 95% of our MPs genuinely think is possible.
You know the old joke about a jury being made of 12 people too stupid to avoid jury duty ? Well the matching political axiom is that parliament is made up of people too stupid to do real work.
I suspect a 3 question grilling would reveal that the majority of MPs struggle with the distinction between Google search results and the fact that they aren't hosted by google ... do you remember when you were learning about computers, and had to distinguish between A and (A) ??????
They tried that with the Pirate Bay. Guess what happened? People outside Britain started opening Pirate Bay proxies and mirrors, turning the whole business into a game of Whack-A-Mole. Knock one down, someone else raises another, and many of them could be in countries where the UK (or even the EU) can't exert influence to block. Then there's the idea of TOR'ing to the Pirate Bay, which means it's relayed a few times (usually to different countries), so the UK loses there, too.
(probably not Military Police - that's what MP means here in the US of A). However, they sound a lot like our idiot Democrats in Congress. They want to pass legislation to force automobile manufacturers to invent a 100 MPG car by around noon next week, or some impossible date like that. Both MP's and Democrats seem to be amazed when they want us to do something impossible (with current technology), and we don't "Just do it".
Let the MP's look for copyright violations, full time - an give their jobs to guys that will give you a free pint and salted peanuts every day. Beer, cos I like beer.
Google co-operates with law enforcement agencies to block child pornographic content from search results and it has provided no coherent, responsible answer as to why it cannot do the same for sites which blatantly, and illegally, offer pirated content.
When law enforcement hand over a list of webpages that a court has agreed are illegally offering content, Google will already remove those pages from search results.
The problem is that these clowns want to do it without the court order.
"The MPs also want jail terms for copyright infringement - not for casual freetards, it appears, but for commercial-scale operators such as Anton Vickerman. They note that the successful prosecution of Vickerman, who operated a site called SurfTheChannel, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud, rather than copyright infringement."
So ... they concede that existing laws have been successfully used against exactly the group that they wish to target, but want new laws that will also apply to people who they say that they don't want to target.
Sheesh! It's just as well that breathing is an autonomic function, isn't it?