The Recording Industry Association of American said Thursday that Google’s algorithm change to lower rankings of sites with “high numbers” of copyright-infringing removal notices has had no “demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy.”
“The sites we analyzed, all of which were serial infringers per Google’s Copyright Transparency Report, were not demoted in any significant way in the search results and still managed to appear on page 1 of the search results over 98 percent of the time in the searches conducted,” the RIAA’s report said. (.pdf)
The report concluded that pirate sites are much more likely to appear in top search rankings than are legitimate music sites.
“Whatever Google has done, it doesn’t appear to be working,” the report said.
Google, which did not immediately respond for comment, announced the algorithm, or “signal,” changeover in August.
At the time, a Google spokesman told Wired that a primary reason for the move was to better the “user experience” in Google search to direct internet surfers to “high-quality” sites. The plan was not a result of any “deal” with the content industry, the spokesman said.
Google receives millions of notices a month under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove infringing content from its search results.
Sites like 4shared.com, audiko.com, beemp3.com, downloads.nl, mp3chief.com, mp3juices.com, mp3skull.com and zippyshare.com repeatedly showed in the top 10 search results, despite Google receiving more than 100,000 removal notices for each site, the RIAA report said.
“There does not appear to be any meaningful decrease in ranking of these sites since the demotion signal was implemented,” the report said.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, search engines must remove links upon request by rights holders who tell the company the links lead to infringing content. If Google doesn’t remove the link, Google itself may be liable for infringement.
In August, when the change was announced, we speculated that the move looked like it was designed to head off potential legislation giving the Justice Department the power to seek court orders requiring search engines like Google to remove from search results websites the government declares to be rogue. Such a feature was included in the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was defeated for altogether different reasons more than a year ago because the package also included tinkering with the (DNS) domain name system.
At the time, we assumed the new algorithm would work better than how the RIAA portrayed it Thursday.
That said, it makes no sense for Google for Google to highly rank pirate sites to the detriment if its own business model, which is more than just online search. Google is a giant media company, and its marketplace called Google Play sells music, books, magazines, movies and TV shows from the world’s biggest content producers.
RIAA Says Google's Anti-Piracy Search Algorithm Is Bogus
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RIAA Says Google's Anti-Piracy Search Algorithm Is Bogus
