5 ms·

Google's Opaque New Policy Lets Rightsholders Dictate Search Results

95 points by mjfern 14y ago

bediger4000 14y ago
What is this new class of nobility entitled "Rightsholders"? They must have something special, as they get to dictate how things work legally, and extra-legally.
lomegor 14y ago
What I don't get about this change is why. I maybe OK if they did these change saying that users want to find content from webpages with mostly legal content, or that content from those website almost always have better quality. But this is not the case here. The only thing I can argue here is that they may be doing it to receive fewer takedown requests in Google Search. But I'm not defending them, as that probably isn't the case.
- taligent 14y ago
  Pretty simple to see why. Google needs a cosy relationship with MPAA/RIAA so they can sell content through the YouTube and Play Stores.
rohit89 14y ago
I submitted a post about this a few hours back. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370224
Zenst 14y ago
Sounds a bit like patent trolls for search results in many ways. Also if I want to buy some fruit and search for Apple, well can see how that works. The internet is open to all and more people eat apples than will ever own a iApple device. Not best example given it uses apples, but is easy to use as an example when you compare searching for apple over a pear. With that you can see how rightsholders factored into search results can play out. Currently search's bias to towards a geek bias and thats fine for us geek. Though it does put of non geeks who might want to buy and apple and not have the search engine kung-fu to see past the rightsholder layers they will encounter and as such shape there mindset. Think I'll like this to milking sheep and whilst this wont effect me or you, it will effect many and they wont even know it, bah.
SeanDav 14y ago
DuckDuckGo must be loving this change. Google definitely seems to be on the path of "Big Brother" and I don't like it.
- jmillikin 14y ago
  DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its search backend, so it's had this behavior for a while now. To find a general-purpose search engine that doesn't comply with the DMCA, you'll have to use Yandex, Baidu, or other foreign-hosted services.
  - sp332 14y ago
    This change only "demotes" search results, it doesn't remove them. So I don't think DDG would be affected much?
    - magicalist 14y ago
      well, we have no idea what bing does with them. As far as I know, bing doesn't even publish the requests they get to chillingeffects or any where else, let alone publish what they do with them. Also, for the GP: bing is not the sole backend source for DDG.
azakai 14y ago
This is particularly ironic since it is Google - owner of YouTube. YouTube is by far the site with the largest amount of infringing content, and the largest amount of takedown requests. But somehow I doubt YouTube will be "demoted" as apparently other sites will be. In fact YouTube has a special position in the top bar of Google products, even better than a search result. Does anyone think Google will be removing it from there? If not, it's clearly unfair to demote any other site that competes with YouTube (or doesn't, for that matter - what's fair should be fair).
- duaneb 14y ago
  It's hard to tell exactly how it will affect YouTube, especially since we don't know how it affects results at all. I suspect the deciding factor will be how google knows about the takedown requests, since it will almost certainly treat YouTube specially. Furthermore, it's possible that YouTube is linked so much that the DMCA requests have a negligible effect. Personally, I think this is a mistake by Google. No reason I can think of makes sense - this won't appease content holders for long.
  - azakai 14y ago
    > It's hard to tell exactly how it will affect YouTube, especially since we don't know how it affects results at all. I suspect the deciding factor will be how google knows about the takedown requests, since it will almost certainly treat YouTube specially. And that is what is wrong here. Google is treating websites it owns in a special way, promoting them in google.com results unfairly compared to the competition.
    - duaneb 14y ago
      Just because they treat their DMCA requests specially does not mean that they don't factor in the DMCA requests.
- mtgx 14y ago
  I'm usually a fan of Google, but I would love for them to get into real anti-trust trouble over not demoting Youtube, too, and getting forced to demote it because of the stupid decision they took themselves about downgrading sites based on DMCA notices. It would be something very satisfying about seeing this backfire against them.
jmillikin 14y ago
I don't understand the arguments of either side in this debate. The RIAA/MPAA claim that demoting copyright-infringing search results in Google will reduce piracy. This assumes that there's some large group of people using Google (or Bing, or Blekko, etc) to find pirated media. I don't see how that is plausible, given that the actual search results for pirated media are almost entirely scams and malware. The EFF is concerned that demoting sites which generate many DMCA notices will muffle free speech. A hypothetical situation is: 1. A site hosts user-uploaded video, and refuses to comply with takedown notices. 2. User Alice uploads an expose of government misconduct, and user Bob uploads a few hundred pirated movies. 3. Google receives DMCA notices to remove links to the pirated movies from their index. 4. Alice's expose is now ranked lower in search results. While this situation is theoretically possible, it seems unlikely. All of the major hosting sites I know of (for video, audio, text, blobs) respond to DMCA notices themselves, and therefore aren't targets for search-engine takedowns. (conflict of interest disclaimer: I work for Google, though not on this project) > Takedown requests are nothing more than accusations of > copyright infringement. No court or other umpire confirms > that the accusations are valid (although copyright owners > can be liable for bad-faith accusations). Isn't this incorrect? Under the DMCA, recipients of a takedown notice can file a counter-notice stating that the material is not infringing. From there, further actions involve the court system.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  > This assumes that there's some large group of people using Google (or Bing, or Blekko, etc) to find pirated media There are. Tens to hundreds of millions of them, probably. E.g. "Watch Game of Thrones" vs "learn to dance": http://i.imgur.com/JNyGy.png http://i.imgur.com/JNyGy.png Google suggests I check these popular searches too: * watch game of thrones megavideo * watch game of thrones episode 1 * watch game of thrones tvduck * watch game of thrones tv links * watch game of thrones episode 2 * watch game of thrones episode 3 * watch game of thrones episode 8 * watch game of thrones season 2 episode 1 online free I don't think they were looking for the link to subscribe to HBO.
  - nivla 14y ago
    "Watch XYZ" does not mean anything since a studio can legally stream their own content. For example: Google "Watch Southpark" and the first result will be from southparkstudios.com. People simply want to watch a certain show online and it doesn't matter to them if its legal or illegal as long as they get to watch it.
3amOpsGuy 14y ago
"Dictate". I understand policy holders can now influence but not dictate results. Am i being unreasonable in thinking this use of inflationary language is wrong? If morally you're on the right side of the argument, which i believe the EFF is, then you must play everything completely straight and by the book - otherwise you just give up your advantage. What language do we reserve for the really bad things.
- taligent 14y ago
  Of course policy holders can dictate results. They can choose to whom they send DMCA notices so all other ranking factors being equal they will have the ability to decide which results go higher than others. And this IS a really bad thing as it the equivalent to online censorship.
curiouscats 14y ago
It does seem to be a bad idea to me. If you had to implement it I would institute a very harsh signal for takedown requests that are proven false. Get 3 false claims in YouTube's internal process (being unreliable I believe is most useful as a state of the systems used by a source, I would use the data I have on false claims from "rights holders" as a way to judge if they are reliable) in a quarter and no influence is given to your claims of knowing what is infringing and just being an abuser of the "rights" system. Most of the big media seem like they would get bounced by this as they seem to flag all sorts of stuff improperly. Again, I would just not do this at all. But if I was told to do it, then I would want to have very strict measures to avoid using "advice" (claims by big content of infringement) from extremely unreliable sources. A benefit of setting up a system that punished false claims is to make those currently spewing out false claims find ways to be accurate. Currently there seems to be no reason not to just claim tons of stuff that you have no right to claim (and it seems there are even incentives in the system to do so - YouTube starts sharing revenue with you on the video you claim). And if they didn't become more accurate then at least not mess up search results by treating the poor signals they provide as trustworthy.
neurotech1 14y ago
Google could make this more transparent, and put a note on the search results, "3 sites in these results are down-rated due to excessive DMCA notices received" The thing is that most reasonably web-savvy people will bypass Google and use a torrent search site or "free-episodes-blah-blah.com" site to find what they want. If the MPAA/RIAA were not dinosaurs lobbyists running a massive fraud campaign, they should look at how sidereel.com is organized. Featured (legal and sometimes non-free) content shows up first, and then the other sites show up second.
domwood 14y ago
I'm literally here to bitch about how fucking inflammatory this title is. Fuck titles, man.
notatoad 14y ago
Everybody seems to be looking at this a little too negatively. 'Demoting' is ultimately a meaningless thing - google does not specify how much the algorithm is going to penalize these sites, just that they will. And they aren't going to make anything disappear from the internet, TPB will still be there and you can still search for content from the TPB homepage. Is it really a big deal if a google search for game of thrones returns the HBO site before a torrent site? This move is going to give google some serious brownie points with the content providers though, which is a good thing for all of us because it means that good content might become more accessible legally.
- incongruity 14y ago
  The problem with this is that it doesn't take much to tip the scales. As this: http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/99356/files/SilversteinHMM99.pdf http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/99356/files/SilversteinHMM... (admittedly old, but foundational) study shows, most web searchers stop after the first 10 results. If a result is (wrongly) pushed off the first page, much less down to the 3rd or 4th, it may as well not be there for almost all users. That, combined with Google's dominant position in search means that pages may well effectively be erased from the internet as far as many users are concerned.

95 points by mjfern 14y ago

What is this new class of nobility entitled "Rightsholders"? They must have something special, as they get to dictate how things work legally, and extra-legally.

lomegor 14y ago

What I don't get about this change is why. I maybe OK if they did these change saying that users want to find content from webpages with mostly legal content, or that content from those website almost always have better quality. But this is not the case here. The only thing I can argue here is that they may be doing it to receive fewer takedown requests in Google Search. But I'm not defending them, as that probably isn't the case.

taligent 14y ago
Pretty simple to see why. Google needs a cosy relationship with MPAA/RIAA so they can sell content through the YouTube and Play Stores.

rohit89 14y ago

I submitted a post about this a few hours back. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370224

Zenst 14y ago

Sounds a bit like patent trolls for search results in many ways. Also if I want to buy some fruit and search for Apple, well can see how that works. The internet is open to all and more people eat apples than will ever own a iApple device. Not best example given it uses apples, but is easy to use as an example when you compare searching for apple over a pear. With that you can see how rightsholders factored into search results can play out. Currently search's bias to towards a geek bias and thats fine for us geek. Though it does put of non geeks who might want to buy and apple and not have the search engine kung-fu to see past the rightsholder layers they will encounter and as such shape there mindset. Think I'll like this to milking sheep and whilst this wont effect me or you, it will effect many and they wont even know it, bah.

SeanDav 14y ago

DuckDuckGo must be loving this change. Google definitely seems to be on the path of "Big Brother" and I don't like it.

jmillikin 14y ago
DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its search backend, so it's had this behavior for a while now. To find a general-purpose search engine that doesn't comply with the DMCA, you'll have to use Yandex, Baidu, or other foreign-hosted services.
- sp332 14y ago
  This change only "demotes" search results, it doesn't remove them. So I don't think DDG would be affected much?
  - magicalist 14y ago
    well, we have no idea what bing does with them. As far as I know, bing doesn't even publish the requests they get to chillingeffects or any where else, let alone publish what they do with them. Also, for the GP: bing is not the sole backend source for DDG.

azakai 14y ago

This is particularly ironic since it is Google - owner of YouTube. YouTube is by far the site with the largest amount of infringing content, and the largest amount of takedown requests. But somehow I doubt YouTube will be "demoted" as apparently other sites will be. In fact YouTube has a special position in the top bar of Google products, even better than a search result. Does anyone think Google will be removing it from there? If not, it's clearly unfair to demote any other site that competes with YouTube (or doesn't, for that matter - what's fair should be fair).

duaneb 14y ago
It's hard to tell exactly how it will affect YouTube, especially since we don't know how it affects results at all. I suspect the deciding factor will be how google knows about the takedown requests, since it will almost certainly treat YouTube specially. Furthermore, it's possible that YouTube is linked so much that the DMCA requests have a negligible effect. Personally, I think this is a mistake by Google. No reason I can think of makes sense - this won't appease content holders for long.
- azakai 14y ago
  > It's hard to tell exactly how it will affect YouTube, especially since we don't know how it affects results at all. I suspect the deciding factor will be how google knows about the takedown requests, since it will almost certainly treat YouTube specially. And that is what is wrong here. Google is treating websites it owns in a special way, promoting them in google.com results unfairly compared to the competition.
  - duaneb 14y ago
    Just because they treat their DMCA requests specially does not mean that they don't factor in the DMCA requests.
mtgx 14y ago
I'm usually a fan of Google, but I would love for them to get into real anti-trust trouble over not demoting Youtube, too, and getting forced to demote it because of the stupid decision they took themselves about downgrading sites based on DMCA notices. It would be something very satisfying about seeing this backfire against them.

jmillikin 14y ago

I don't understand the arguments of either side in this debate. The RIAA/MPAA claim that demoting copyright-infringing search results in Google will reduce piracy. This assumes that there's some large group of people using Google (or Bing, or Blekko, etc) to find pirated media. I don't see how that is plausible, given that the actual search results for pirated media are almost entirely scams and malware. The EFF is concerned that demoting sites which generate many DMCA notices will muffle free speech. A hypothetical situation is: 1. A site hosts user-uploaded video, and refuses to comply with takedown notices. 2. User Alice uploads an expose of government misconduct, and user Bob uploads a few hundred pirated movies. 3. Google receives DMCA notices to remove links to the pirated movies from their index. 4. Alice's expose is now ranked lower in search results. While this situation is theoretically possible, it seems unlikely. All of the major hosting sites I know of (for video, audio, text, blobs) respond to DMCA notices themselves, and therefore aren't targets for search-engine takedowns. (conflict of interest disclaimer: I work for Google, though not on this project) > Takedown requests are nothing more than accusations of > copyright infringement. No court or other umpire confirms > that the accusations are valid (although copyright owners > can be liable for bad-faith accusations). Isn't this incorrect? Under the DMCA, recipients of a takedown notice can file a counter-notice stating that the material is not infringing. From there, further actions involve the court system.

dangrossman 14y ago
> This assumes that there's some large group of people using Google (or Bing, or Blekko, etc) to find pirated media There are. Tens to hundreds of millions of them, probably. E.g. "Watch Game of Thrones" vs "learn to dance": http://i.imgur.com/JNyGy.png http://i.imgur.com/JNyGy.png Google suggests I check these popular searches too: * watch game of thrones megavideo * watch game of thrones episode 1 * watch game of thrones tvduck * watch game of thrones tv links * watch game of thrones episode 2 * watch game of thrones episode 3 * watch game of thrones episode 8 * watch game of thrones season 2 episode 1 online free I don't think they were looking for the link to subscribe to HBO.
- nivla 14y ago
  "Watch XYZ" does not mean anything since a studio can legally stream their own content. For example: Google "Watch Southpark" and the first result will be from southparkstudios.com. People simply want to watch a certain show online and it doesn't matter to them if its legal or illegal as long as they get to watch it.

3amOpsGuy 14y ago

"Dictate". I understand policy holders can now influence but not dictate results. Am i being unreasonable in thinking this use of inflationary language is wrong? If morally you're on the right side of the argument, which i believe the EFF is, then you must play everything completely straight and by the book - otherwise you just give up your advantage. What language do we reserve for the really bad things.

taligent 14y ago
Of course policy holders can dictate results. They can choose to whom they send DMCA notices so all other ranking factors being equal they will have the ability to decide which results go higher than others. And this IS a really bad thing as it the equivalent to online censorship.

curiouscats 14y ago

It does seem to be a bad idea to me. If you had to implement it I would institute a very harsh signal for takedown requests that are proven false. Get 3 false claims in YouTube's internal process (being unreliable I believe is most useful as a state of the systems used by a source, I would use the data I have on false claims from "rights holders" as a way to judge if they are reliable) in a quarter and no influence is given to your claims of knowing what is infringing and just being an abuser of the "rights" system. Most of the big media seem like they would get bounced by this as they seem to flag all sorts of stuff improperly. Again, I would just not do this at all. But if I was told to do it, then I would want to have very strict measures to avoid using "advice" (claims by big content of infringement) from extremely unreliable sources. A benefit of setting up a system that punished false claims is to make those currently spewing out false claims find ways to be accurate. Currently there seems to be no reason not to just claim tons of stuff that you have no right to claim (and it seems there are even incentives in the system to do so - YouTube starts sharing revenue with you on the video you claim). And if they didn't become more accurate then at least not mess up search results by treating the poor signals they provide as trustworthy.

neurotech1 14y ago

Google could make this more transparent, and put a note on the search results, "3 sites in these results are down-rated due to excessive DMCA notices received" The thing is that most reasonably web-savvy people will bypass Google and use a torrent search site or "free-episodes-blah-blah.com" site to find what they want. If the MPAA/RIAA were not dinosaurs lobbyists running a massive fraud campaign, they should look at how sidereel.com is organized. Featured (legal and sometimes non-free) content shows up first, and then the other sites show up second.

domwood 14y ago

I'm literally here to bitch about how fucking inflammatory this title is. Fuck titles, man.

notatoad 14y ago

Everybody seems to be looking at this a little too negatively. 'Demoting' is ultimately a meaningless thing - google does not specify how much the algorithm is going to penalize these sites, just that they will. And they aren't going to make anything disappear from the internet, TPB will still be there and you can still search for content from the TPB homepage. Is it really a big deal if a google search for game of thrones returns the HBO site before a torrent site? This move is going to give google some serious brownie points with the content providers though, which is a good thing for all of us because it means that good content might become more accessible legally.

incongruity 14y ago
The problem with this is that it doesn't take much to tip the scales. As this: http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/99356/files/SilversteinHMM99.pdf http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/99356/files/SilversteinHMM... (admittedly old, but foundational) study shows, most web searchers stop after the first 10 results. If a result is (wrongly) pushed off the first page, much less down to the 3rd or 4th, it may as well not be there for almost all users. That, combined with Google's dominant position in search means that pages may well effectively be erased from the internet as far as many users are concerned.