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Music Biz Wants Google To Stop Linking To The Pirate Bay - TorrentFreak
- obsaysditto 16y agoRather than supplying very specific URLs where infringing material could be located as is the norm with these type of requests, the BPI provided whole site URLs such as http://megaupload.com http://megaupload.com, http://sendspace.com http://sendspace.com and http://hotfile.com http://hotfile.com. This seems absurd, however I do wonder what the percentage of files hosted on these sites are copyrighted.
- bad_user 16y agoEvery file is copyrighted dude, except content gone into public domain ... I think you meant "illegally distributed".
- pixelbath 16y agoI browsed the site instead of using the search just now. It's possible that many of the torrents I've never heard of are independent artists in the public domain (or released CC, whatever), but almost all files in all categories were illegally distributed content. The exception was the "Applications > Unix" category. It's a site that calls itself "The Pirate Bay." They don't have much of a defense in the way of legitimate (legal) use cases, but I strongly disagree with legislating results out of a general-purpose search engine. I honestly do not see this going anywhere. As much as I disagree with almost everything the DMCA stands for, safe harbor provisions were included for exactly this reason.
- cabalamat 16y ago> It's a site that calls itself "The Pirate Bay." So? I belong to a political party called "the Pirate Party", doesn't mean I'm breaking the law.
- nailer 16y agoIf you exist solely for the purposes of facilitating piracy, you probably are, depending on the country. Go ask a lawyer.
- cabalamat 16y agoWe exist solely for the purpose of changing UK government policy to something sensible. This means inter alia that some actions now called "piracy" would become legal.
- nailer 16y ago* Equating copyright reform with supporting piracy will harm any attempt at copyright reform. * I didn't give you permission to steal my work to advance any objective. I think you've created a manifesto to justify stealing things, because you like stealing things.
- cabalamat 16y agoHow many times do you have to be told that copyright infringement is not theft, for it to sink in?
- nailer 16y agoa) Have you proven stealing my work isn't theft yet? b) Regardless whether you personally define stealing my work as being theft or not, does that make it less wrong? Because I strongly suspect that's what you're implying. You still haven't responded to how equating copyright reform with piracy helps copyright reform in any way.
- tomjen3 16y agoWell you could upload all the books from project gutenberg and librivox.org. But even then, I doubt that 1% would be non-copyrighted.
- avar 16y agoThis could turn out great. The music industry sues Google for linking to sites like The Pirate Bay, and Google with its deep pockets successfully defends linking in count. That might set precedence not only for general search engines like Google, but also torrent search engines like The Pirate Bay.
- CodeMage 16y agoMaybe I'm not as cynical and jaded as I should be, but I still believe that lawsuits are not won by deep pockets, at least not exclusively.
- rfrey 16y agoI think the point is that Google has deep enough pockets to defend against the also-deep pockets of the music distributors. Lawsuits aren't won by deep pockets, but it often takes deep pockets to defend, and lack of defense is the same as losing.
- dagw 16y agoThe music industry will never let it go so far as to a court case which will set that sort of precedence. They may be dumb, but they aren't that stupid.
- gojomo 16y agoOr Google could go the way they went with the Authors' Guild/Book-Scanning settlement: start by arguing the principle of indexing-for-fair-use, but then cave when a settlement is possible which grants them a unique leading position over all competitors. That is, they'd grant that such linking is illegal for the industry -- setting the exact precedent the rightsholders want -- but then strike a license that lets them continue linking on terms few others could manage.
- qq66 16y agoReminds me of Marbury v. Madison...
- gustaf 16y agoI thinks this is probably good. TPB always claimed that there is not principal difference between thepiratebay.org and google.com in terms of linking to filesharing content.
- BonoboBoner 16y agoI doubt they will obey to the music business overlords after telling the government of the biggest internet-market to go F themselves.
- Estragon 16y ago"It's nice to want things."
- steveitis 16y agoAnd in further news cows want you to eat more chicken.
- nailer 16y agoGoogle already de-list & pageRank for sites that disobey their terms (except if Jason Calacanis runs them). If they include sites that exist expressly for illegal purposes as against their terms, a site whose name and purpose is based on piracy would be naturally de-indexed. If you make software, or otherwise create stuff you'd like people to obey your terms for, this is a good thing. If you: * wouldn't like someone disobeying the GPL * wouldn't like someone stealing your desktop app * wouldn't like someone copying your web apps source to their own servers * wouldn't like someone ripping off your CSS then congratulations, you support IP. Having TPB de-indexed will help your fellow creatives. When you're 15 and poor, stealing seems pretty reasonable. When you're 30 and make stuff, it isn't.
- dantheman 16y agoAgain and Again it must be said that violating copyright is not stealing. Second, a lot of what your complaining about isn't even copyright violation it's plagiarism and fraud. I think most people realize that copyright is prime example of regulatory capture, how else can obscene concepts like retroactive extension be endorsed and enacted with straight face. Second, look at how much leverage they have over industries that are significantly bigger than the entertainment industry. Copyright is a flawed concept, as is much of intellectual property.
- singlow 16y agoτὸ σὸν γὰρ ἄνθος, παντέχνου πυρὸς σέλας, θνητοῖσι κλέψας ὤπασεν.
- nailer 16y ago> Again and Again it must be said that violating copyright is not stealing. That's a side argument, which is irrelevant. The point is it's wrong. > a lot of what your complaining about isn't even copyright violation Plagiarism is copyright violation. > copyright is prime example of regulatory capture, how else can obscene concepts like retroactive extension be endorsed and enacted with straight face. I think most people don't really care one way or the other. But how is market share of distribution networks relevant to ethics? Doing something wrong to someone else who did something wrong is still wrong.
- riprock 16y agoI doubt google will agree with their terms. Youtube is arguably as guilty as thepiratebay, megaupload, and etc for harboring illegal content...google is not going to set up a potential argument to delist youtube (themselves.) Also if google does ban them, there will be other search engines that do index such sites; it really doesn't solve anything really.
- _flag 16y agoAlthough I'm sure the copyright industries would love to do this, "including but not limited to" doesn't exactly translate to "ban all of it".