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: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday May 15 2019, @06:05PM (6 children)
Google disappears torrent terms from autocomplete search results [theregister.co.uk]
Google removes ‘Kodi’ from search autocomplete in anti-piracy effort [theverge.com]
Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results [torrentfreak.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Freeman on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:17PM (5 children)
Ouch, seriously, Kodi is a legitimate piece of software. As far as I know the creator isn't actively supporting "piracy" and Kodi has legitimate use beyond "piracy".
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0, Disagree) by rigrig on Wednesday May 15 2019, @08:54PM (4 children)
No it doesn't, accessing media without paying a subscription fee and being tracked is the very definition of "piracy".
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday May 15 2019, @09:04PM
Which is exactly why my Kodi box uses my legitimate subscriptions to access the media I pay for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @09:28PM (2 children)
Yes, it does. Like many, many people, I've been using Kodi for a good decade or so to enjoy video content from DVDs & BDs that I have bought. No streaming, no subscriptions, and certainly no tracking.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 15 2019, @10:42PM (1 child)
I think rigrig may have been trying to make a joke. Fell flat, whatever it was.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Thursday May 16 2019, @09:14AM
It was meant as a cynical observation on who gets to define "piracy".
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 15 2019, @06:33PM (29 children)
It's amazing how many still just don't get it about copying. Piracy should be decriminalized, not stopped. Why? Piracy is impossible to prevent, but that's not the main reason why. It's that sharing of knowledge is nothing less than the foundation of our civilization, our rise to the top of the animal kingdom, and our hopes to head off disasters of the sort that killed off the dinosaurs.
Of course artists and scientists should be fairly compensated for their work. I think few would disagree with that. And of course we want to promote progress. The question is the means. There is abundant evidence that intellectual property is terrible, so terrible it would be hard to imagine anything worse. It would be better to have nothing than to have copyrights and patents. Copying is a natural right. Trying to impose artificial scarcity on knowledge is folly. If it was possible to fully enforce intellectual property rights, that would merely confirm the tyranny and unfairness of the whole idea of treating knowledge as if it was no different than a material good, by enabling the hoarders of wealth to also hoard, control, and bury knowledge, and set themselves up as the ultimate gatekeepers of the essentials necessary for civilization to function. They would be able to hold us all hostage, and our choices would be to go back to old stone age living, or pay their extortionate prices, assuming they cared to sell at all, which they might not.
Microsoft has shown they don't get it. They made Windows "phone home", they tried the Plays For Sure crap, and still try to impose DRM on their customers. There was hope Google was better than that, especially with their "don't be evil" motto, but.... Maybe they do understand at Google, but feel they can't resist all this pressure to cave in.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @06:51PM (8 children)
So how will artists and scientists be fairly compensated for their work without a legal framework that protects their work?
Or how do you otherwise propose to protect their work so that they are fairly compensated? On the one hand you're saying they deserve fair compensation, but on the other hand you're saying knowledge should not be protected / one should have nothing as preferable to the current system of protection. Effectively you're saying fair compensation for artists and scientists ranges from zero to whatever-people-want-to-give?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:17PM (2 children)
So how will artists and scientists be fairly compensated for their work without a legal framework that protects their work?
There are a bunch of non-draconian solutions to having and enforcing copyrights and patents, but they miss the REAL point of IP law, which is to create government entitlements to monopolies, primarily as architectures of control to limit what people can do, and keep a kudgel handy for anyone whose innovations sufficiently threatens the status quo.
For example, one approach that would probably work well would be forced licensing with an obligatory payout to the patent/copyright holders (like the US did with aviation patents during WW I, when they "nationalized" the Wright Brother's patents and allowed anyone who could to design and build planes based on those patents, to try to catch up with Europe where those patents were not recognized). There are many approaches, some of which would work better than others (this is by no means exhaustive, and probably not even the best variant of this solution):
Patent or Copyright holder(s) get X%, where X is some reasonable value (say, for purposes of argument, 10% of the gross revenue of the Widget, Book, or Movie that in today's system would "violate" the patent or copyright. Percentages probably wouldn't be the same for both--copyright could probably be as high as 50% of gross revenue, while patents might need to be a smaller percentage to allow innovation based on existing patents to be economically viable, but for purposes of illustration that doesn't matter).
That percentage is then split among the patents/works being used in the product, so let's say widget A uses 4 existing patents, then each patent holder would get 0.25*(payout_percentage), or 2.5% of gross revenues for Widget A each.
Anyone can make anything based on public knowledge (I can make a movie based on your book and you can't stop me, but you're entitled to royalties of whatever amount, derived from my gross (not net!) revenue). Ditto for everything else.
This gets rid of the draconian need to police copyright and patent violations, and reduces it to a civil approach, complete with a legal framework for deterministic payouts to copyright holders, and civil remedies if someone cheats (say, 3x payout plus penalties for past-due work, and normal payouts going forward).
This can no doubt be refined, but should be sufficient to get the idea across.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:37PM (1 child)
First, since this article was in the context of copyright and since copyright and patents are nothing like each other, I'm going to stick with copyrights.
The devil would be in the details. First, you assume the publisher is the copyright holder. That can happen, certainly, but is by no means guaranteed. Second, part of the publisher's value is that they have the exclusive right to produce the content. Yes, you can tamper with that as your proposal does, but the second you do you remove part of the value that the publisher could claim. The publisher would now be in competition with anybody else who wants to publish the material, so would have to lower their prices. I'm not saying that isn't desirable, but it does muck up any equations you might try to come up with as to what "fair" is.
How do you determine a "reasonable value" in a system where no holder has an exclusivity? And if the production costs are 10% and I as the holder am getting 90% of the value (let's say I'm marketing directly and hosting everything myself), then why do you get 80% of that value? And turn it around - I sold my rights to the publisher and their production cost is 80% (including paying me off as the rightsholder) and now you want to take away all the profit and then some.
Aside from that, I fear you've just created an even more draconian system of government-mandated prices which is even worse. Plus you still require someone to be policing the world to find violators.
All in all it sounds much better to say that the creator of the work has the exclusive right to produce it and anyone else who wants to reproduce it must license the right to do so.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @09:11PM
As the author of a book who makes money on copyrights, I feel I should speak up here. First, I found the grandparent poster's proposal interesting and, at first look, quite workable. Perhaps even better than the publishing deals I've managed to get (and I haven't done too badly).
The grandparent brought in both patents and copyrights, calling for them both to be banned. The parent suggested a more workable, reasonable compromise that maximizes freedom while retaining mechanisms for paying copyright (or patent) holders.
The devil is always in the details. The grandparent poster said as much, and admitted the details would probably need to be tweaked.
I don't think your assumption as to the poster's assumption holds. Their approach works just fine whether or not the publisher is the copyright holder. The copyright holder is entitled to remuneration. The publisher's remuneration would be down to whatever contract is between them and the copyright holder.
So what? Who cares if that value goes away. Publishers can compete on other grounds, marketing, or perhaps a more favorable percentage when licensed by the copyright holder directly rather than reverting to unlicensed rules and percentages.
If you have an agreement directly with the copyright holder, those numbers shift. I don't really follow where you get the 80% value from, but if I understood the grandparent correctly, the grandparent is proposing rules that fall into place for unlicensed use. Presumably a copyright holder and publisher or filmmaker could negotiate more favorable terms, not unlike trading under EU rules vs. the default WTO rules (as Britain is about to find out if they crash out come Halloween). Both work, one is more profitable than the other, but in both cases, the work is free to use but not cost-free to use.
Aside from that, I fear you've just created an even more draconian system of government-mandated prices which is even worse.
Hardly. People aren't being threatened with prison, or financial ruin. Just required to pay some pre-determined percentage of their gross to the actual copyright holder if they use their work without permission. Enforcement mechanisms can be triggered by the copyright holder, via civil claims through a regulatory body, or maybe via a lawsuit. Not quite the same thing as having the RIAA pounding on your door.
And if you're not selling anything, just making copies for your own use, then you're either not liable at all, or maybe liable for the cost of buying a copy of the song, book, or whatever. Far less draconian than what we live under now.
All in all it sounds much better to say that the creator of the work has the exclusive right to produce it and anyone else who wants to reproduce it must license the right to do so.
In other words, back to having knowledge owned exclusively by some person or, more likely, some faceless corporation. It doesn't get much more draconian than that. There may be issues with the approach the grandparent poster suggested, but they seem minor compared to what we have now, and what you're proposing we stick with.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:25PM (1 child)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:44PM
"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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 15 2019, @08:32PM
The meaning of "Paid like a Rockstar" will change, dramatically.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @10:45PM
I've been digging holes in the dirt and then filling them in again. This is hard work. Where do I get my compensation for this work?
And how do I stop other people digging holes the same shape as holes I dig? After all, I own that hole, nobody else should be able to copy it.
(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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @06:52PM (8 children)
Soylent Search Engine?
Because everybody knows websites are powered by people! It's the green alternative to coal! :)
Seriously though, maybe it is time to start a companion non-profit project to do web spider and results aggregation, but headquartered in a country with more lax IP laws and subcontracting spidering services to fellow non-profits headquartered in nations whose datacenters we need access to. This won't eliminate all potential censorship of search results, but it would provide a reduction compared to current threats both corporate and government in nature.
Food for thought.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:29PM (2 children)
Even better, make it decentralized and hook it up to darknets like TOR, Freenet, etc. Don't make it purely piracy, or black market based either. Search terms and domains that are blocked by governments should be covered by the service (with the exception of the nasty bullshit like KP).
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:39PM
Already attempt some level of that, metasearch, distributed search, etc. Apache Solr(?) can do per site search results and network together for aggregated results I believe.
As much as I would like to see a fully decentralized search network, it is more likely to succeed as a non-profit driven project than attempting to get another p2p project off the ground. As it is right now we are already seeing IRC, bittorrent, Tor, and I2P all dwindling in interest. There are a lot of other p2p projects out there in various states of interest and progress, but from what I have seen none are becoming ubiquitous on account of their decentralization along. 'Marketed Faux Privacy' seems to have plenty of mindshare and traction.
In order for a search engine, even a decentralized one, to succeed, it is going to need default search links in major browsers, android/iOS search app/widget/plugins, and enough financial pull to seed the critical mass of nodes to make it interest the niche users and then the mainstream populace. It took Mozilla... 5-7 years to succeed after Netscape, and they only did because of Google Financing and some punk kid writing Phoenix (which became Firefox, and was originally native GTK(2?) not XUL!) If it hadn't been for that clean sheet browser design Mozilla would have died as the Netscape Browser Bundle and its Mozilla rebadge (I don't even remember what it was called, but it sucked BADLY.)
Soylent Search Engine seems needed even if only as the seed to a more advanced and decentralized system, just like the pre-XUL Phoenix builds were.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday May 16 2019, @12:20AM
Even better, make it decentralized
Yes, please [yacy.net]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:46PM (4 children)
You already have DuckDuckGo. The only problem is it sucks as a search engine when lined up alongside Google.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @10:28PM
Actually, it doesn't. It's no better than google, but then again it's no worse. At least for the searches I do, YMMV.
But google now certainly does suck when lined up alongside google of only a few years ago.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 16 2019, @01:08AM (2 children)
Do you mean, sucks beside uncensored Google, or sucks beside censored Google?
Many of us just loved Google, when Google was new. We loved it less, as time went on, because ubiquitous tracking. And, loved it less as tracking became more invasive. Depending on philosophy and politics, Google becomes more unlovable as Google takes sides on issues which are of no legitimate concern to Google. Censorship? If Google refuses to provide information on subjects in which people are interested, then Google loses much of it's love.
We can't have the Google of a decade ago. It's gone. The Google of today is sucking. The Google of tomorrow promises to suck a helluva lot harder.
(Score: 5, Informative) by deimtee on Thursday May 16 2019, @03:09AM (1 child)
I didn't like the tracking, but that wasn't why I stopped using google. It used to be that you found what you searched for; now you get what google thinks you should be looking at based on the words you used, or similar words, or even not very similar words if it gets more ads.
It went from being the precise tool of a hacker's* search engine to a "here's what's popular with the masses" pile of crap. The worst of it is that if you go to the trouble of using an uncommon word to narrow results they strip it out with the patronising "Not many pages used the term Foobar, so we searched for Funny Beiber for you".
They lost me completely when they disabled verbatim search entirely.
They can print "Don't be Evil" on a large piece of angle iron and shove it up their collective arse.
*Old school ESR meaning of hacker.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 16 2019, @04:05PM
Being the kind, considerate kind of person, I think we should preheat that cold iron for them. I'll be right back with the oxy-acetylene cart!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Wednesday May 15 2019, @06:53PM (6 children)
Trying to impose artificial scarcity on knowledge is folly.
Maybe so, but up until now it has proven to be incredibly successful. I guess it's easier to play *cat and mouse* than it is to seek out and vote for people that could change the law and maybe make it respectable in the process.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @10:01PM (5 children)
Once a politician IS elected, voters cannot do a thing, except say goodbye to their rights being auctioned off to lobbyists.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday May 16 2019, @12:15AM (4 children)
Nonsense, they can be voted out next term. There is no requirement to reelect anybody.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 16 2019, @08:21AM (3 children)
It is what makes profit for the gambling house.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday May 16 2019, @04:12PM (2 children)
Try the place next door. Or open your own. You're not fighting the "system". You are fighting your neighbors.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 16 2019, @06:48PM (1 child)
And which, a brace or three newspapers?
Some kinds of rote responses are really too inane to be used in practice. Do upgrade your stockpile.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday May 16 2019, @07:11PM
Sorry, if you can't be bothered, so be it. But thanks for illustrating the source of the problem.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:21PM
Google got too big, and as they say "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The bigger and more "powerful" a company becomes, the bigger the temptation for corruption.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 15 2019, @08:30PM
At an individual level, probably.
At an individual level, definitely. However, laws are actually more effective in policing the 10,000 largest corporations than they are at policing the 7 billion individuals on the planet. What anti-piracy laws do effectively is to paint a huge: "sue me for damages" target on any large-scale piracy operation.
-----
Unrelated, I just can't unsee: "Google Joins Australia's Piracy Crackdown with Twerking Search Results"
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crafoo on Wednesday May 15 2019, @09:19PM
Copyright is a fairly recent invention. Like, maybe a few hundred years old at most? Throughout history being able to make copies of written works was seen as fundamental truth and the way things should be. So yes, I agree with you.
The reason given for governments (us, we the people) granting copyright was to motivate creators to continue to create by giving them limited monopolies on their works. Clearly, this is not how copyright works now. IF it was ever intended for the reason we were given, it has been grossly perverted.
(Score: 2) by corey on Wednesday May 15 2019, @09:58PM
While I completely agree with you, and everyone else here would, this issue isn't about big sky concepts like human freedoms and rights, it's about capitalism and that alone. IP is there so the artist can make money from their creations. Actually in this case, it's the leeches in the middle trying to make more money.
(Score: 3, Funny) by SomeGuy on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:17PM (1 child)
Your search - anything - did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
* Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
* Try different keywords.
* Try more general keywords.
* Give up on this crufty old search engine and go elsewhere.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @08:17PM
The Preeeeeeeeeeeesent: Your search - anything - get tons of similar sounding results but none containing all your keywords or relevant to your search.
I think that your future is better. At least won't get the spam.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @08:36PM
And with this move, piracy has now ended once and for all.
Once and For All!
At this moment there are a bunch of Somalis in search of a new occupation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by corey on Wednesday May 15 2019, @10:00PM (3 children)
Is that this will have negligible effect on piracy. All the pirates are using dedicated search engines, not Google.
Google knows this, it's a "we'll scratch your back if you scratch ours" move.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @11:33PM (2 children)
Some examples may bring some +Informative mods.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 16 2019, @07:14AM (1 child)
The first rule or Pirate club is you do not talk about Pirate club.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 17 2019, @03:52AM
I remember the days of private torrent trackers where you had to know someone to get in
Good times.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Wednesday May 15 2019, @10:51PM
If I go to google.com.au and search for 'the pirate bay' not only is it the top result, but the suggestion box on the side says:
People also search for:
KickassTorrents - RARBG - YIFY
1337x - EZTV - ExtraTorrent
I think these are all torrent sites too. :)
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday May 21 2019, @06:54PM
So Australian authors won't be able to use Google to track down those that unlawfully copy their work.