back to article Google agrees to break pirates' domination over music searches

UK government-hosted talks spanning two Parliaments have culminated in Google and Bing at last agreeing to tweak their search results in response to copyright-holders' concerns, thereby heading off threatened legislation on their conduct. The code means Google, Bing and other search engines will demote illegal sites from the …

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  1. David Gosnell

    Malware

    Will they also demote the indirect malware links some music searches lead to, which AFAIK are currently not flagged as such, by virtue of the indirection? Searching for a particular track leads to a hopeful looking result with a suitably large WAV download on an FTP server. Downloading the WAV it appears it's in an encrypted format, and requires the download of a proprietary decoder, which is of course pure malware. The downloaded "WAV" file itself is reportedly pure white noise to the appropriate length, probably served off a server that faked the size in the first place and just pipes from /dev/random to order. I hasten to add I've never got further than the initial download (for a legitimate purpose), but understand others have not been so lucky. It's a particularly nasty attack on those having to go to desperate lengths to find music not available by any other channel.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good thing there's no way to get around Google UK demoting these search results...

    Ah.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. earl grey
    Facepalm

    just for a day

    it would be nice if, just for a day, the "two big" search engines blocked say....

    The top 1000 song artists

    The top dozen music publishers

    All the top "rights" groups

    and returned the search with a "sorry, we can't provide that today to show you how government control of search is a bad thing..."

  4. Matthew 3

    Am I missing something?

    They are only talking about demoting the illegal search results. So anyone who wants a dodgy MP3 will simply click straight to page 5 of the search results, won't they?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No slope left, this is free fall.

    Restricting peoples access to information, particularly that which is illegal, is a great idea for government and the status quo. It is for the safety of the children and only targets criminals, such restrictions should have been in place all along.

    What could possibly go wrong?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The net is dying taken over by corporate greed

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      And...

      And also taken over by big government.

  7. IsJustabloke
    Trollface

    Damn Right they should put a stop to it....

    The fewer ways to get hold of Kanye TalentVacuum output the better. I

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Too slow.

    Arent most people ripping youtube now?

    Barn door analogy here.

  9. David 132 Silver badge
    Happy

    The article picture rather undermines their argument.

    Downloading Kanye/Yeezus tracks is the neatest of crimes, in that it inherently includes its own punishment. Maybe they should have picked a better image to use for illustration!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Time to switch to yandex.ru for media files, then

    or yandex.com if your russian is not up to scratch.

    1. P. Lee

      Re: Time to switch to yandex.ru for media files, then

      or a firefox extension which returns page 2 from google results.

      See? This is why open source is such good indicator of criminality!

      We should ban it.

      Or maybe, we should pass a law which says that google can only ever return one page of results. Maybe remove the "search" button and just leave the "I feel lucky" one.

  11. ZenCoder
    Facepalm

    Apparences over Reality

    This kind of BS is the end result of someone being paid to look busy and pretend to be doing something useful about a problem.

    There will be no penalty for false positives so they will probably do something stupid like a broad keyword search for all sites having audio files for download without logging in.

    However somewhere will be able BS at length when asked what they are doing about music piracy.

  12. Ogi

    Run your own search engine?

    Yacy is a peer-to-peer search engine, everyone partakes in spidering and indexing sites for search.

    The more and more I see search engine companies move from helping me find information I want to controlling what information I see, the more I have been looking into running my own node:

    http://yacy.net/en/index.html

    I can't think of a way for them to control the flow of information to you, if you have a copy of the index yourself. Plus the more people join in, the better the index gets.

    Plus it helps randomise the sites you visit, as the spidering tool goes constantly to random URLs, so some noise generation to reduce the SNR now that everywhere you visit is logged, yet which actually has some benefit to the community as well :-P

  13. GrapeBunch
    Pint

    Medicine without leeches.

    If somebody wanted to set up a fair-use foundation, the music equivalent of a clearing house for donation-supported software, it would have some hurdles to clear. For example, one hurdle would be that 100% of the donated money got to the intended recipients. Another would be that the intended recipients be choosable. For each track, you could choose whether you wanted the donation to go to the musicians, to the technicians, to some charity, or to the label itself. We know in 2017 that this would not work, because the label executives always find ways to siphon off money. It's what they do. Expecting them to do otherwise is like expecting a rat to be tidy. So, would a government pass legislation prohibiting labels from siphoning or clawing back this money--and regardless of whatever weasel words are in the contracts with the musicians--with 3x damages and possible jail terms for the execs? Without that, the idea is a non-starter.

    You'd need good ways of anonymizing donations, first that a person donated at all, and second which particular pieces were chosen. Otherwise, labels would try to convince gov't that fair-use donations were an admission of copyright infringement. It's absurd, but it would take only one crooked administration somewhere in the world to start an ugly mudslide.

    So, for example, one might want to donate $5 for fair-use of The Beatles, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds to the Timothy Leary Foundation (if there is such a thing, I apologise). On the credit card bill one would want it untraceable, and on the site, at its Lucy page, the donation would be credited to a hash code, which one (but not anybody else) could verify. For the untraceability aspect, it makes sense to me that the site fall under the wing of a large retailer, even though otherwise that makes me cringe. So it would show up on your credit card bill as a transaction with Orinoco, which nobody would question because 99.9% of its transactions are for widgets. Thinking out loud.

  14. Alan Penzotti
    Mushroom

    Include them all

    Dear Google,

    When you implement this "to ensure that search engines do not link to the worst-offending sites," please include ALL mentions of the works in question, including fan sites, the publishers and copyrights holders too.

    The publishers and copyright holders are the worst offenders when it comes to ripping off the artists.

  15. dbannon

    Amazon

    Yeah, Amazon, I tried to buy a piece of music from Amazon for my wife's funeral. They made me create a account, took my credit card details and then, and only then, said "No, you are in Oz, we don't supply this to Oz".

    My point is, they make it so hard, the illegal guys make it easy. Google ranking is based on who get the most clicks (to some degree) and people like "easy". If the legal people offered a better service, they might get a higher ranking naturally.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    LOL

    I'm happy that they are all over this "illegal web site" stuff. For obvious reasons I will not say why - let's just leave it at "it's never stopped me" ... Mostly I just get mp3 versions of my old LP's but occasionally I'll pick up something new, and on occasion I'll even buy the CD if it's any good.

  17. Mage Silver badge
    Devil

    It's nonsense anyway

    a) Google returns higher up, sites that use their services (analytics, APIs, adverts, cloud etc) to make more money.

    b) Google thinks you are more interested now in using them as a bookmark service (deliberately accentuating places you visited before) rather than wanting a genuine search for places you never have seen.

    So obviously the screen shot is from someone always looking for warez, those are the regular sites used and/or they run Adsense etc.

    They seemed to stop being a neutral genuine search service years ago?

  18. nilfs2
    Pirate

    Google is the biggest pirate of them all

    Just look at YouTube

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Too late, I've already filled my boots. The Sun will be just an ember by the time I've listened to everything I have.

    I pity the young'ns of today as they'll be force fed the same old top 40 crap, at least piracy gave you a chance to hear things you never even knew existed, a crate diggers wet dream.

  20. Winkypop Silver badge
    Big Brother

    war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength

    We love you citizen. INGSOC

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In other news..

    Sales of TOR relays (yes this is a thing now), cheap WiFi modules with open firmware and routers with easily accessible Flash chips are going up.

    I did wonder about the ethics of operating a TOR "box" for folks who want to access the climate data and anything else of interest to amateur scientists like all the papers removed from arXiv, the peer review process is so flawed that we could have found room temperature superconductivity a dozen times by now but the papers keep getting taken down by the Establishment because it interferes with their HTSC gravy train.

  22. lukewarmdog

    What this really does..

    Surely if you just promote Amazon over all else, you solved the problem demonstrated here.

    Great for Amazon, great for Googles income streams as people pay to be higher than Amazon for the same search term.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Response

    To the governments that are trying to control this... FUCK YOU! You do not get to dictate how we run our business, and we will pay no fines. If you don't like it, then you are welcome to block all traffic to and from our servers.

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