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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 16 2019, @02:54AM
You pay them first rather than after the fact in a subscription based manner. Some movie gets created, they demo it to theaters, theaters say they'll pay $$ to have it to play, and if $$ is high enough the movie is sold. The theaters can then play it however much and however long they want to, no further payments to the creators. For a non-theater based model the creators release a trailer, people pay into a pool like kickstarter, then when pool is big enough the movie is digitally released for free to everyone. The creators get paid and everyone gets the content. Or a different model of you saying you want to make a movie about ZYX and people donate $ to your project so you end up with a movie with a budget of $. If that ends up being popular, you can ask again saying you want to make it even better and the next promotion leaves you with a $$$ budget.
It's only greed, money, monopolies, and corruption which keeps the current media industry intact. There's so many other ways of funding, creating, managing, and releasing entertainment media. IP laws can still keep people from creating alternative story lines, but people would be free to share the stories since their creators have already all been paid. However people want free income for life so as many industries as possible are moving to rent seeking models.
Being paid once for a work is fair. Being constantly paid for something you did a decade ago isn't fair. The current payment models are corrupt as hell.