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Google is making it harder for users to access The Pirate Bay Website, part of its growing efforts to limit search access to Websites that illegally share copyrighted content.
Google announced its stepped-up effort in August, and The Pirate Bay, a file-sharing site, is the latest target. The Pirate Bay has been removed from Google’s “auto-complete” search function, meaning that users can’t begin typing in the site’s name and then watch it auto-complete in the browser.
The move was reported in a story Sept. 11 by the BBC.com as a way that Google is working to prevent the use of auto-complete to find materials that infringe on copyrights.
The Google action, however, doesn’t prevent searchers from eventually reaching The Pirate Bay Website if they type in the complete address.
Google began censoring links to other pirated material in its instant and auto-complete tools last year, according to the BBC. “According to the TorrentFreak news Website, Google added The Pirate Bay to its list toward the beginning of August, leading to a sharp decline in the amount of search results it displayed for the file-sharing site,” the BBC reported.
Google’s auto-complete capability allows Web searchers to seek search results more quickly by using an algorithm that predicts and displays searches based on searches by other users, according to Google. “We also apply a narrow set of removal policies for pornography, violence, hate speech and terms that are frequently used to find content that infringes copyrights,” Google states in its auto-complete documentation page.
The BBC, however, reported that in the case of The Pirate Bay site, “the move may be largely symbolic, as it does not seem to have had an impact on the number of people using The Pirate Bay.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the auto-complete changes.
In the Case of Pirate Bay, the Move May Be Largely Symbolic
Google took a step toward helping to better protect copyright holders in August when it announced that it was updating its search engine algorithm to rank Web sites lower if they’ve been reported as infringing on the copyrights of others.
The move comes as part of an evolving method to better protect copyright holders from having their content reused by others who don’t pay for it, whether in print, film, audio, images or any other form.
To retune its search algorithm, Google now takes into account a new “signal,” or data point, in its search rankings-the number of valid copyright removal notices Google receives for any given site. Those removal notices are filed by copyright holders when they believe that a Website is using their content without permission, a procedure provided under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The new signal joins a list of more than 200 others that are factors used in the ranking of Web pages by Google’s search engine to help provide accurate results for users.
For copyright holders, the move by Google is a good one that should continue the slow progress being made in the area of copyright-protection online, according to experts.
What the algorithm change does is penalize Websites that are already illegally infringing on copyrighted content by pushing them lower in Google’s rankings so they can get fewer hits and fewer advertisement referrals, making them less profitable.
Google’s new algorithm change can’t actually tell if a particular Web page does or does not violate copyright law. It can only take infringement reports from copyright holders and use them as a factor in the rankings. Only a court can actually decide if a copyright has been infringed. Because of this, Google won’t remove any pages from the results of the search query unless they receive a valid copyright removal order from the affected party, according to the company.
In a related event, one of the co-founder of The Pirate Bay was arrested in early September in Cambodia as he tried to avoid a jail sentence in Sweden, according to an earlier eWEEK report.
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 27, who had disappeared after being found guilty of illegal file sharing in 2009, was arrested in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, according to various sources, including Swedish-language newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Warg, a native of Sweden, faced up to a year in jail and a hefty fine for his participation in the dissemination of 33 copyright-protected files.
The Pirate Bay is a Swedish file-sharing site that was founded in 2003 and hosts magnet links to all sorts of media files, including popular films, video games and music. The Pirate Bay bills itself as “the world’s most resilient BitTorrent site” and has survived numerous legal barrages, raids and changes to its technical architecture. The magnet links are used to reference resources available for download via peer-to-peer networks which, when opened in a BitTorrent client, begin downloading the desired content.