Google vs. MPAA: The Beginning and Continuation of History

    For some reason, the habr community has bypassed the news that on October 20, Google launched a new algorithm that allows much more actively and radically lower sites with pirated content in search results. And although Google has worked in this direction before, since 2012, now for the first time it has become really noticeable. So, the vast majority of torrent trackers and sites with direct links to books, movies and everything else, it has become almost impossible to find in the search results even for specific queries such as “smth download” or “smth torrent”. However, the behavior of Google, which for the first time made such serious concessions to anti-piracy companies, not only did not reassure the copyright holders, but, on the contrary, irritated them even more. In just a week after the announcement of the new algorithm, 11,668,660 new addresses were received in the database of deletion requests.

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    Personally, I want to add that the frequent cases where I could not find the information that interests me in Google even on the 3rd - 4th page of the issue forced me to set duckduckgo.com by default as a search engine. And I think many have acted in this way, at least from among those who generally understood what happened. From my own experience I’ll say that it was rather difficult to move away from the usual paradigm “if something cannot be found in Google, then this doesn’t exist at all”. Thus, Google itself arranged a certain outflow of traffic to other search engines that did not practice such filtering methods.

    And yesterday, finally, the first positive news appeared in the whole story. Over the past couple of months, Google has done everything to “please” MPAA (American Film Association) - deleting 10 million records every week, and very quickly - within a few hours. But no matter how you set up Google your algorithms - greedy copyright holders will still be few. Over the years, the film association has stepped up its pressure on Google, and each time it announced new changes, the MPAA (and RIAA, the record label association) immediately told the press that much more could have been done. However, this time, after such extensive work on pirated pages, Google expected a more cordial welcome. But, alas, he was mistaken again. MPAA in its press release spoke about the search engine and its work as follows:

    “Each of us has a responsibility to help stop illegal online behavior, and we are pleased to see Google recognize its role in facilitating access to stolen content through search.”

    It’s not surprising that Google was furious with such rudeness. Thanks to Sony’s recent hack , where correspondence between companies was revealed, we’ll find out that the search giant thinks about it:

    "[Google] conveyed that they feel that they went beyond what the law requires; that they climbed out of their skin, to please us, and in return received a caustic remark, instead of a well-deserved credit of trust. "

    In response to the insult, Google clicked on the Ignore button. A top manager in the Google policy department told MPAA that his company will no longer “talk or do business” with the film company association. In the future, Google will negotiate directly with film companies, as "at least 3 of them said they were very pleased with the new search engine features." The association believes that Google reacted too dramatically, and in the future, problems in understanding will be resolved. Perhaps the relationship between the companies has really changed since then, as letters were written back in October.

    From myself I’ll add that at the moment the most popular torrent tracker kickasstorrentsis in search results as high as before. It seems that Google search is becoming relevant again, let's hope that this will continue in the future.

    Based on an article on TorrentFreak .
    More details: From the leaked correspondence, it turned out that the MPAA was planning to bribe officials to attack Google .

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