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Google Refuses to Delete Pirate Websites from its Search Results

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Google says it is sick and tired of being the entertainment industry's bitch. Well, not in those exact words, but close enough. ;)

The copyright industry and Google continues to quibble about online piracy, both in public and behind closed doors. Copyright holders want Google to remove pirate websites from its search results but Google’s Eric Schmidt says this is not going to happen. Schmidt stresses that his company is making changes to reduce piracy, but that policing the web and deleting websites goes against Google’s philosophy.
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As long as big wigs like google keep to a stance like this we're in good shape. They start folding and we are screwed.
 
Kinda long but worth it...
The copy monopoly in those days concerned fabric patterns. It was in France, prior to the revolution. Some patterns were more popular than others, and to get some additional revenue to the crown’s tax coffers, the King sold a monopoly on these patterns to selected members of the nobility, who in turn could charge an arm and a leg for them (and did so).

But the peasants and commoners could produce these patterns themselves. They could produce pirated copies of the fabrics, outside of the nobility’s monopoly. So the nobility went to the King and demanded that the monopoly they had bought with good money should be upheld by the King’s force.

The King responded by introducing penalties for pirating these fabrics. Light punishments at first, then gradually tougher. Towards the end, the penalty was death by public torture, drawn out over several days. And it wasn’t just a few poor sods who were made into public examples: sixteen thousand people, almost entirely common folk, died by execution or in the violent clashes that surrounded the monopoly. In practice, everybody knew somebody who had been horribly executed for pirating.

Here’s the fascinating part:

Capital punishment didn’t even make a dent in the pirating of the fabrics. Despite the fact that some villages had been so ravaged that everybody knew somebody personally who had been executed by public torture, the copying continued unabated at the same level.

So the question that needs asking is this:

When will the copyright industry stop demanding harsher punishments for copying, since we learn from history that no punishment that mankind is capable of inventing has the ability to deter people from sharing and copying things they like?
 
Google can't permit that in today's legal mess.

If you agree to take down pirate sites, and for whatever reason, you don't, the RIAA can sue for millions. Heck, 30 songs = $650,000?

Even if Google thought it was good idea, they can't. RIAA screwed themselves.
 
I still wonder if they are aware that the high publicity of this mess is a two edge sword. It will stop some pirating, but it will make some consumers afraid of digital media. Radio and broadcast TV have always been an option for entertainment.
 
They are just one unjustified lawsuit against an innocent family from really rocking their boat.
 
phawkins633 said:
Kinda long but worth it...
The copy monopoly in those days concerned fabric patterns. It was in France, prior to the revolution. Some patterns were more popular than others, and to get some additional revenue to the crown’s tax coffers, the King sold a monopoly on these patterns to selected members of the nobility, who in turn could charge an arm and a leg for them (and did so).

But the peasants and commoners could produce these patterns themselves. They could produce pirated copies of the fabrics, outside of the nobility’s monopoly. So the nobility went to the King and demanded that the monopoly they had bought with good money should be upheld by the King’s force.

The King responded by introducing penalties for pirating these fabrics. Light punishments at first, then gradually tougher. Towards the end, the penalty was death by public torture, drawn out over several days. And it wasn’t just a few poor sods who were made into public examples: sixteen thousand people, almost entirely common folk, died by execution or in the violent clashes that surrounded the monopoly. In practice, everybody knew somebody who had been horribly executed for pirating.

Here’s the fascinating part:

Capital punishment didn’t even make a dent in the pirating of the fabrics. Despite the fact that some villages had been so ravaged that everybody knew somebody personally who had been executed by public torture, the copying continued unabated at the same level.

So the question that needs asking is this:

When will the copyright industry stop demanding harsher punishments for copying, since we learn from history that no punishment that mankind is capable of inventing has the ability to deter people from sharing and copying things they like?
Click to expand...
Nice tale. Not sure if the conclusion can be demonstrated since we don't have a comparable case study to compare the level of copying against. That and these patterns appear to have been public domain originally so the sentiment to respecting copyright may not have been viewed the same. Additionally these patterns were likely sold for profit in a time where no income meant you starved to death.

So although I believe too much effort is placed on enforcing copyright, a free for all would produce much different behavior and does a disservice to those producing the intellectual property.
 
Remember that the software industry became massively profitable BEFORE any copy protection. Ditto for movies and music.

IIRC, it wasn't until Win95 that MS put any copy protection in their products. By then they were already one of the world's biggest companies.

As internet bandwidth and HDD space increased, it became necessary due to file sharing remotely. People putting a single seat of Windows on 5 machines was never a serious issue prior to that.
 
I used to write software for a CAD/CAM company. This was a $5000 product. We got calls all the time for tech support but the person wasn't in our sales database. The company eventually collapsed. So pirates cost me a job once.
 
Qinsp said:
I used to write software for a CAD/CAM company. This was a $5000 product. We got calls all the time for tech support but the person wasn't in our sales database. The company eventually collapsed. So pirates cost me a job once.
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I mean no disrespect or to make light of your situation, but to say that the company collapse was due to piracy.. wouldn't you have to assume that every single pirated copy equated to a lost sale? Or in other words, if folks didn't pirate the CAD software, they would have purchased a copy?

That seems difficult, if not impossible, to prove and appears to be one of the reoccurring themes at the heart of the piracy debate. I guess the question is: what is the true, measurable impact of piracy in different markets? I don't doubt that some niches/markets can collapse due to piracy, however, I don't see the impact being a linear constant across the board. It would be an interesting topic to research.
 
ehksohset said:
I mean no disrespect or to make light of your situation, but to say that the company collapse was due to piracy.. wouldn't you have to assume that every single pirated copy equated to a lost sale? Or in other words, if folks didn't pirate the CAD software, they would have purchased a copy?

That seems difficult, if not impossible, to prove and appears to be one of the reoccurring themes at the heart of the piracy debate. I guess the question is: what is the true, measurable impact of piracy in different markets? I don't doubt that some niches/markets can collapse due to piracy, however, I don't see the impact being a linear constant across the board. It would be an interesting topic to research.
Click to expand...

Companies pirate CAM software to save money. They absolutely need the software or their CNC machines won't make money. $100,000 machine means you need to get the most out of each hour of operation, so you try and buy/get good stuff.

So they stole either our stuff, or somebody else's stuff. Years ago, it was estimated there were more copies of pirate CAM software than legal owners.
 
phawkins633 said:
Kinda long but worth it...
The copy monopoly in those days concerned fabric patterns. It was in France, prior to the revolution. Some patterns were more popular than others, and to get some additional revenue to the crown’s tax coffers, the King sold a monopoly on these patterns to selected members of the nobility, who in turn could charge an arm and a leg for them (and did so).

But the peasants and commoners could produce these patterns themselves. They could produce pirated copies of the fabrics, outside of the nobility’s monopoly. So the nobility went to the King and demanded that the monopoly they had bought with good money should be upheld by the King’s force.

The King responded by introducing penalties for pirating these fabrics. Light punishments at first, then gradually tougher. Towards the end, the penalty was death by public torture, drawn out over several days. And it wasn’t just a few poor sods who were made into public examples: sixteen thousand people, almost entirely common folk, died by execution or in the violent clashes that surrounded the monopoly. In practice, everybody knew somebody who had been horribly executed for pirating.

Here’s the fascinating part:

Capital punishment didn’t even make a dent in the pirating of the fabrics. Despite the fact that some villages had been so ravaged that everybody knew somebody personally who had been executed by public torture, the copying continued unabated at the same level.

So the question that needs asking is this:

When will the copyright industry stop demanding harsher punishments for copying, since we learn from history that no punishment that mankind is capable of inventing has the ability to deter people from sharing and copying things they like?
Click to expand...

This is such an important historical lesson, but like all other important historical lessons, 90% of the population and 99% of the political class will learn nothing from it.
 
Keep in mind, the machine will generate about $200/hr income while running. So in 2 days they can pay for the software. So it's just being pirated to maximize profits.
 
Qinsp said:
I used to write software for a CAD/CAM company. This was a $5000 product. We got calls all the time for tech support but the person wasn't in our sales database. The company eventually collapsed. So pirates cost me a job once.
Click to expand...

Doubt it, it failed because your company failed to adapt to a changing market. $5000 is an awful lot for a startup to pony up when they likely have a high CNC lease payment. Why not work it so the software is leased? Or has an extended trial? Use hardware dongles to help combat piracy. This gets you in their door to develop a relationship, they're less likely to pirate the software.
 
Spidey329 said:
Doubt it, it failed because your company failed to adapt to a changing market. $5000 is an awful lot for a startup to pony up when they likely have a high CNC lease payment. Why not work it so the software is leased? Or has an extended trial? Use hardware dongles to help combat piracy. This gets you in their door to develop a relationship, they're less likely to pirate the software.
Click to expand...

You might find this hard to believe, but in the era I was writing CAD/CAM code, a mainstream CAD/CAM system was over $50,000 a seat. Some over $150,000 a seat.

When the PC's came along, numerous companies sprang up to offer affordable CAD/CAM solutions. This is where I came in. The idea that you could have a 3D 5-axis surface modeling CAD/CAM station for under $10k was amazing.

And one seat of software would be enough for up to a dozen or more CNC machines.
 
riot8ap said:
How many of those pirate sites contain Google Adwords? I'd wager that more than a few pirate sites use Google's service and Google profits from it. Why would Google cut their profit if what they're doing isn't illegal?
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I wouldn't say that's their motivation, but it may not be because they don't want to be the RIAA's lapdogs.

Its probably more to do with the fact that such searches among others would create an opportunity for a competator to build a customer base around. People are lazy, but the benefit of such searches for those who do that is great enough people will remember and make an effort to use a search engine that will give those results.

Its like multiplayer cheating could be severely cut back if video cards had anti-cheat features baked into the hardware. Most people are afraid to resolder their video cards. Anyway if a video card company did that, they would lose the cheaters to their competitors.
 
Qinsp said:
Companies pirate CAM software to save money. They absolutely need the software or their CNC machines won't make money. $100,000 machine means you need to get the most out of each hour of operation, so you try and buy/get good stuff.

So they stole either our stuff, or somebody else's stuff. Years ago, it was estimated there were more copies of pirate CAM software than legal owners.
Click to expand...

I can see where you're coming from a bit better now. So in your instance, piracy was a huge issue. As far as piracy goes in a commercial environment, wouldn't you deny support to those who called in and obviously weren't paying customers? Secondly, wouldn't the loss of support and updates be enough to make the pirating companies pony up? Something doesn't quite add up in my mind, if the software solution was so inexpensive compared to competitors at the time.
 
ehksohset said:
I can see where you're coming from a bit better now. So in your instance, piracy was a huge issue. As far as piracy goes in a commercial environment, wouldn't you deny support to those who called in and obviously weren't paying customers? Secondly, wouldn't the loss of support and updates be enough to make the pirating companies pony up? Something doesn't quite add up in my mind, if the software solution was so inexpensive compared to competitors at the time.
Click to expand...

There was a lot of competition as well. Most the illegal seats were not in the USA. We started putting dongles on the software for overseas customers, but then a cracked version sprang up.

MasterCam (our #1 competitor) survived, even though they were perhaps the most stolen of all the brands. We had more features at the time, but they had the better marketing skills and connections.

Here's a little sample of how things in industry are. One of my customers has 200 employees. Good and profitable business. I helped a third party programmer develop an Adobe Acrobat plug-in for my business. He put 40 hours into developing it, but put it on the market for $99. When my customer saw the gadget, he was in love with it. For 2 years he bugged me to make him a copy of it. Each time, I just gave him the email address of the programmer.

$99, perhaps a $100m company, and STILL wanted a "free" copy.

Some people just don't understand that programs are labor. Like painting a house. Most the cost is labor.
 
Good stuff. Did not figure they had a choice though, but good to see they do, and are standing up.
 
why would they try to remove the pirate websites/searches that would fail the purpose of google.
 
I love the fact that the industry that moved to California to escape Edison and his patents, and pirated his intellectual copyright to make their movie studios and what not, are not doing exactly what Edison tried to do to them.
 
If that is the content you are looking for there are far better search engines to find it. You just need to know where to look.
 
Qinsp said:
There was a lot of competition as well. Most the illegal seats were not in the USA. We started putting dongles on the software for overseas customers, but then a cracked version sprang up.
Click to expand...

Not really buying it. Now I do agree that no security is 100%. There will always be someone somewhere who will be able to crack even the most bullet proof of security measures. However, the options that exist do prevent wide scale piracy on the biblical scale necessary to bring down a business.

Game development is an industry that's survived for decades, lives and dies on the sale of software, and has to deal with software piracy just as any developer does. Is it extinct? No. How many AAA titles get released into the wild during the early stages of development? Very few I can assure you of that if you consider the hundreds of versions developers will go through during a product's entire development cycle. You might see a random beta here or there but nothing at the level necessary to bring an entire franchise down.

Every time I see a company blame piracy for their woes 99% of the time the security measures they have put into place were either laughable, or just completely inadequate. At some point companies do have to take responsibility for changing with the market they are participating in.

While I hate car analogies it fits here. Over half of the cars that are stolen daily are not due to failed security measures but because the owner left the doors unlocked or the windows down.
 
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