Obsessed With Google, Copyright Holders Ignore The Actual Pirated Content

[NelsonG]

[img]http://torrentfreak.com/images/kickass.jpg[/img]Entertainment industry groups, such as the RIAA, BPI, IFPI and MPAA, view BitTorrent sites [url="https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-wants-to-shutter-torrent-sites-and-more-111116/"]as a major threat[/url].

Owners of BitTorrent sites, on the other hand, believe they do nothing wrong.

All of the major torrent sites, The Pirate Bay excluded, have a takedown policy and remove links to infringing content when they’re asked to. However, for some reason copyright holders send many more takedown requests to Google for these torrent sites, than the websites receive themselves.

In other words, Google is asked to remove links to infringing content on torrent sites, but the copyright holders aren’t bothering to take the original content down.

This unusual situation becomes more clear when we compare the DMCA takedown statistics of Google and KickassTorrents.

Over the past month Google removed more than [url="http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/kat.ph/"]125,000 kat.ph URLs[/url] from its search index. KickassTorrents on the other hand received only 2,536 DMCA requests in the same period. In total Google received 1,344,885 takedown requests for KickassTorrents URLs while the site itself was asked to take down “only” 278,864.

So why this discrepancy? Shouldn’t the priority be to take down the actual URLs instead of Google’s links to them?

Speaking with TorrentFreak the owners of KickassTorrents explained that they have staff who remove infringing content swiftly when they are asked to, so it’s hard to see what’s stopping the copyright holders.

“We are very serious about removing copyrighted content following DMCA requests. We have staff who review and process all incoming requests. On working days the processing time of these requests never takes longer than several hours,” KickassTorrents said.

But perhaps copyright holders have another reason to focus more on Google?

It is no secret that they want [url="http://torrentfreak.com/copyright-industry-calls-for-broad-search-engine-censorship-120127/"]Google to do more[/url] to make pirated links unavailable in their search engine, and high DMCA stats may give the rightsholders a better position in these negotiations.

While copyright holders are within their rights to ask Google to remove links to infringing content, it would make sense to ask the target sites to do the same. In fact, if the original content is taken down there is no need for Google to remove these links.

TorrentFreak asked the BPI and RIAA to comment on our findings but we have yet to receive a response. Perhaps they’re busy writing DMCA notices to Google?

Source: [url="http://torrentfreak.com/obsessed-with-google-copyright-holders-130415/"]Obsessed With Google, Copyright Holders Ignore The Actual Pirated Content[/url]

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