This article originally ran in the April issue of AVN.
Much has been said in the media recently about Google’s role as a facilitator of piracy. A recent report by Professor Jonathan Taplin of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab listed Google as one of the Top 10 advertising networks supplying ad revenue to piracy sites. To compile his report, Taplin used Google’s own Transparency Report to show the most egregious piracy sites are using major advertising networks like Yahoo and Google to finance their enterprise-level copyright infringement.
But the Google problem goes much deeper than just how the search engine giant lines the pockets of exploitative piracy sites. Google seems content to turn a blind eye toward the actions of the same sites it acknowledges as repeat infringers.
Last month one of our clients released a title they had hoped would be a big seller. But before the title was even released, it was already being killed by pirate listings. This is because piracy sites scam Google by indexing every search ever run on their site and treating it as a unique content page, full of advertisements of course, and fake links to download materials. So these days it is quite common for pirate sites to outrank the legitimate sites before the movie is even available. But once the movie is released, the problem becomes increasingly worse.
While Google’s Transparency Report lists sites like ThePirateBay.se, Filestube.com, ExtraTorrent.com, and Kat.ph as some of the most notorious infringers, those sites continue to dominate the top results for movie titles. Despite Google’s promise to downrank pirate listings, there has seemingly been no penalty put in place for those sites. All of these sites have had more than 1 million infringements lodged against them with Google, yet Google seems to be unsure if a million or so complaints are worthy of a downranking.
It is completely reasonable to think if Google wanted to do the “right thing” they would downrank the sites that are constant targets of infringement reports. But Google seems absolutely determined to not only not downrank pirate sites, but in doing so, they continue to help those sites rake in the ad dollars.
And make no mistake about it; there are ad dollars aplenty. Piracy today isn’t about content as much as it’s about showing advertisements and the subsequent advertising dollars they bring in. And you can sell a helluva lot of ads showing content you don’t have any cost in producing. Recent reports show that 96 percent of the $37.9 billion Google made in 2011 came from advertising. It’s then no wonder people like Google fight so hard against anti-piracy measures containing requirements for ad networks to cut off pirates, like the one in the much-maligned (and Google-opposed) SOPA bill. And when you make $38 billion dollars a year, you can certainly afford to not only oppose anti-piracy legislation, but you can set up a really elaborate lobbying arm to get Congress to bend to your will.
Google is far and away the biggest spender of lobbying money in the tech sector, with 2012 figures estimated at around $17 million to $18 million, twice what they spent in 2011, and in some fiscal quarters the Google lobbying total was more than the next three companies combined. And much of that lobbying money has gone toward matters like the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trading Agreement, both of which have intellectual property implications.
But at the end of the day, I assume most content producers don’t care about the ins and outs of lobbying, but the grim reality of losing valuable search engine placement to shady overseas thieves. In the example movie I mentioned before, a Google search of the title goes a long way in showing just how bad the problem is.
Google has a policy of showing how many results have been removed from each search page because of copyright infringement. For this particular movie, Google has been forced to remove 42 URLs from just the first page of results. That’s 42 piracy results that would have been in the top 10, squeezing out almost every legitimate retailer or video-on-demand service. At one point all ten results on the first page of Google were pirate listings.
From the Top 100 results, we have had to report 187 URLs for removal. And nearly all of those were from sites that are well-known piracy sites that rank high in Google’s own Transparency Report. And keep in mind, we’re not talking about results where people are clearly looking for free downloads of pirated movies, i.e. “movie title + torrent” or “movie title + free.” These are just results for the name of the title—period. Those searching for legitimate outlets to view these movies have to sort through site after site offering pirated versions.
Google, to a large degree, controls the copyright infringement faucet, and they aren’t likely to shut it off anytime soon. It’s reasonable to assume they fear that downranking or removing pirate sites from their listings would drive traffic to competitors like Bing or Yahoo, which would mean a drop in the money those pirate sites bring in to Google via ad dollars. Of course Bing and Yahoo would then become the target of copyright holders, but the traffic lost by Google might be irreplaceable.
In the meantime, Google’s declarations of working to help legitimate artists and content producers have to be taken as empty unfulfilled promises. Until Google gets real about cleaning up its search results, content producers would be wise to stay vigilant and continue to apply pressure on search engines and advertisers to stop putting money into the pockets of the content thieves who have created empires from the exploitation of other people’s hard work.
Takedown Piracy is an anti-piracy service started in 2009 by Nate Glass, a 13-year veteran of the adult industry. TDP offers copyright holders an affordable and effective means to fight back against content thieves. To date TDP has removed over 1.6 million content infringements, and it closely monitors 200 piracy websites. For details, visit TakedownPiracy.com.
