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RIAA: Google is ineffective at preventing piracy

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 21 Feb 2013 9:15 User comments (13)

RIAA: Google is ineffective at preventing piracy Last year, Google publicly announced it would be demoting all accused piracy sites in its search rankings.
This week, the RIAA has said the search giant is ineffective at preventing piracy, and the sites are just as easy to find as they ever were.

The RIAA, which is a trade group for the major record labels, initially applauded the decision but now seems to have turned to their usual negativity.

"We have found no evidence that Google's policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy," the RIAA added. "These sites consistently appear at the top of Google's search results for popular songs or artists."



For their report, the group searched for Billboard Top 100 hits, such as "Diamond" by Rihanna and "Locked Out of Heaven" by Bruno Mars.

The group tracked sites that Google themselves identify as "serial infringers" in their Copyright Transparency Report, and says that they were still "on page 1" in Google search results "over 98 percent of the time." Google defines a serial ingfringer as a site that is accused multiple times of hosting unauthorized content by copyright holders.

On the other end of the spectrum, "Well-known, authorized download sites, such as iTunes, Amazon and eMusic, only appeared in the top ten results for a little more than half of the searches. This means that a site for which Google has received thousands of copyright removal requests was almost 8 times more likely to show up in a search result than an authorized music download site...In other words, whatever Google has done to its search algorithms to change the ranking of infringing sites, it doesn't appear to be working."

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13 user comments

121.2.2013 21:40

I fail to see how it's Google's fault that the label-sanctioned music retailers suck at marketing.

221.2.2013 22:25

It's not really Google's responsibility to do your work for you. Get a job.

322.2.2013 08:52

Yeah Google should just show what's out there. If it's infringing or something then the offended parties should deal with it. Google shouldn't be censoring reults to suit these jerks.

422.2.2013 09:02

To be fair I just ran the test myself and the RIAA are dead wrong, sort of. The first 1/2 of the results are facts about the song (lyrics/wiki/sheet music)the second result in fact was a video uploaded by Rianna herself. The rest were not what I would call pirate persay.. they mostly look like scammy malware sites.

Googles done their part for getting rid of torrent results and that's about it. The worse part is the malware sites, stop those instead.

522.2.2013 12:06

Nobody's wrecking the internet for the US film & music industry.
Get over it.

You're already one of the most profitable enterprises on the planet, suck it up & grow up.
You can't monetize everything everytime.

622.2.2013 12:13

I think the reason those songs don't show up in Google searches for Itunes is the people with an itunes account will go straight to itunes and then search using itunes.

722.2.2013 12:37

Google is the AIG of the internet. Our lovely nation couldn't kill out AIG therefore they bailed them out...........all because they're "Too big".

Google is the same.

823.2.2013 02:14

If the money a song earned went to the musicians then maybe people would care. But more than 75% goes to the RIAA.

Makes you wonder why the RIAA hate music piracy. $$$$$$

923.2.2013 02:44

The RIAA is the most ineffective of all.

1023.2.2013 07:59

So what. If a newspaper prints that there is illegal drug activity in a certain section of town and a person goes there and buys illegal drugs, is the newspaper guilty of aiding and helping a drug dealer?

1123.2.2013 13:01

I don't see why they should be doing that to begin with. So much for America being the land of the free...lol. When you have to go so far as to pressure a search engine to censor search results. They may as well let China invade now or better yet North Korea...Kim Jong Il is laughing in his grave right now...saying " I told you so"...lol. Goddamn commie Americans.

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 23 Feb 2013 @ 1:02

1224.2.2013 06:22

If you search for crap, you will get crap results. GIGO, anyone remember that?

I agree that as a music 'collector & enthusiast', that it is increasingly hard to find anything anymore. Even old stuff that is long out of print. Thank you RIAA for ruining that. I'll just take my TB drive with over 60k albums and go home!

1325.2.2013 18:29

It's called SEO
Search Engine Optimization
Torrenters know how to use it and apparently Apple does not.

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