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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 15 2019, @05:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-no-evil-only-when-it-suits-us dept.

"Give us torrents or give us freedom!" Cried absolutely no one in Australia after Google decided to start filtering out torrent site results from search queries submitted from Australian locations.

The tech giant has voluntarily agreed to remove sites that facilitate copyright infringement from its search results, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. Google has reached a voluntary agreement with Australian ISPs and content rights holders to de-index sites that have been blocked by internet providers under recent laws.

With the search giant of the internet on their side local content owners will no longer need to jump through hoops and costs to petition for sites to be occluded based on a purely voluntary agreement between ISPs and and content owners. The Australian Federal Government introduced laws in 2015 for blocking sites deemed to be breaching copyrights, following up in 2018 with 65 sites and over 378 domains blocked. This way of dealing with the issue has been roundly criticized for years by interested parties.

In response to this recent agreement a spokesperson said "Google supports effective industry-led measures to fight piracy," while local content representative Graham Burke has said that "Google is leading people to the back door" "shamelessly facilitating crime by leading people to pirate sites" while everyday Australians follow the advice of a former Communications Minister and just use a VPN making the filtering by Google moot.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:25PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:25PM (#843937)

    Not-for-profit copyright infringement should be decriminalized.

    For-profit copyright infringement should remain criminalized, but it also needs harsher penalties for pro-copyright groups who then commit infringement. I am thinking of when the RIAA pirated software or the BSA was using unlicensed media on its website, or when Getty images was discovered to have scraped independent photographers work and passed it off as its own while demanding licensing fees (of the author no less, if I remember correctly.)

    These situations happen again and again. The individual non-corporate copyright holders should be given first line of protection. Corporate copyright should be second or third string and primarily protected against other corporations, with both easier to prosecute and easier to defend against provisions for smaller creatives.

    Part of the problem today is that work for hires get protections well past the necessary time to recoup, and are allowed to transfer copyrights from independent authors to themselves with copyright protection maximized. Start closing some of these holes, make copyright half a reasonable person's lifestime (max of 30-35 years, ideally shorter) and see how much new innovation or reinvention of formerly copyrighted concepts, code, etc are had.

    As a further addition: require all digitally produced copyrighted works to have the original source files, whether artwork, source code, or other media, archived and presented to the copyright bureau for the region it will be published, to ensure that future generations benefit and progress thanks to the work of the past, like copyright and patents were intended to promote.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:44PM (#843946)

    "Not-for-profit" in the eyes of whom? "I don't mean to make anything for this, so I should have the right to copy it and give it away, thus destroying the profits of the company who has the license for that right and paid for its production." Doesn't fly. And if there is no profit to be made at something it isn't actionable as a tort anyway - there has to be an establishment of actual or potential damage.

    Individual and corporate copyrights are interesting. The immediate loophole that would be created is that a corporation would find a "yes man" to act as the individual who holds the copyright. Plus, contract law is much more complex than that because many times you have an individual who might license their work for a corporation to create in a different medium. Is Ian Fleming the copyright holder of all the James Bond films? Nope. Eon Productions is. But mess with things like 'corporate copyrights' and you then mess with the right that Ian Fleming's estate (and he himself in life) held to license Bond out for film portrayal.

    I agree with you that the term of copyright is now ridiculous, and that anything seeking copyright should be registered with the Library of Congress who would keep a copy for future benefit.