Copyright Industry Calls for Broad Search Engine Censorship
January 29th, 2012Via: Torrent Freak:
At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.
censoredIt’s no secret that the entertainment industries believe search engines are not delivering enough when it comes to protecting copyright works. Just last month, the RIAA and IFPI accused Google of massively profiting from piracy, while putting up barriers to make life difficult for rightsholders.
If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear.
The document, which describes a government-overlooked “Voluntary Code of Practice” for search engines, was not intended for public consumption but the Open Rights Group obtained it through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.
Wow! That didn’t take long. I didn’t have time to digest the Stalinist Scholar story yet. I’m trying to, but still can’t get my head around how anything in the world could ever get better if you throw out the non-conforming views. My mantra is: Different is not always Better, but Better is always Different. Why bother to go to Stanford if you only want to conform?
I remember when wealthy Americans were boycotting companies that did business in South Africa. Now when someone points out that iPhones are made by slave labor the response is: “don’t be dissing my iPhone”. I’m just not sure that the iProduct crowd will ever care about things like censorship, or if they can even understand it.
This is actually suggesting that lower search rankings be given to searches with words like ‘download’ or ‘MP3’. I suspect it’s already been going on for a while, but if you haven’t seen something because it’s censored then you don’t know what you’re missing.