Every week the search engine receives millions of DMCA takedown notices requiring it to take case-by-case action, but the company’s reluctance to do something more permanent has made it search-engine-enemy-#1 with copyright holders who never miss an opportunity to lay on the criticism.

In the background, however, Microsoft’s Bing flies comparatively under the radar. Sure it processes plenty of takedown notices too, but it receives little of the corporate pressure piled onto Google. This can only be a result of Google’s place in the market, since Mr Don’t Be Evil has done more than its rival to combat piracy.

Case in point, Bing’s powerful and somewhat under-used streaming video search engine which offers to find TV shows from the get-go.

While Google gets heavily criticized for its AutoComplete feature (which is already partially censored following copyright holder requests), Bing has no problem in first offering TV shows and then completing suggestions of what to watch. Tap in “BRE” and at the top of the list appears BREAKING BAD. We clicked the option – Bing delivered.

The first few results are shown below but those are just the tip of the iceberg and more specific show searches hardly ever come up short either. The auto-suggestions at the top of the screen are there in case ideas run out too, helpfully pushing the user towards varies series and specific episodes.

As can be seen from the image above, those who are fussy over the quality of the content being presented can filter by resolution too, right up to 1080p. Also, restricting searches to videos over 20 mins rejects many trailers and other samplers in favor of episodes and full length movies.

Aside from being a pretty good search engine (it came up with some long-forgotten TV show pilots from the 1970s), Bing also has a rather nice trick up its sleeve. Hover a mouse over any video thumbnail shown in the results and its size will instantly increase to display a proper video preview of the content in question. As far as we’re aware, no other search engine online today does that.

Of course, someone at Bing isn’t deliberately programming its engine to present infringing results, those are determined by intelligence gleaned from user search requests. That being said, if Google debuted a new “TV Show” search engine tomorrow and began auto-completing and auto-suggesting infringing TV content, weeks-long industry hysteria would ensue.

It’s also worth pointing out that Google also has a decent video search which is almost certainly used by many, many more millions than Bing’s. It’s nowhere near as glossy and definitely not as ‘risky’ in how it presents content, but that won’t stop the search company from continuing to take most of the rightsholder flak due to its colossal userbase and its uncontested position in the market.

Make no mistake, Google will remain in the firing line for the foreseeable future, even while other companies get away with much, much more. But their time will come, it’s almost inevitable, an event that could be triggered by Google caving in to increasing rightsholder demands.

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Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In closed meetings Bing, Google and Yahoo have been discussing these issues with copyright holders. Thus far, however, the search engines have been reluctant to do more than simply responding to DMCA takedown notices, as required by law.

Keeping the pressure on, copyright holders have responded by sending more and more takedown notices. Most of these are directed at Google, who have received over 100 million so far in 2013, but the others aren’t being ignored.

Traditionally, Microsoft doesn’t publicize any takedown statistics but the company informed us that they process hundreds of thousands of DMCA requests for Bing every month.

“Each month, Bing receives DMCA notices from a variety of copyright owners that seek removal of hundreds of thousands of URLs,” a Microsoft spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

Ironically, Microsoft itself is one of the most active senders. The company says that through their anti-piracy partners they target a variety of search engines, Bing included.

“We submit DMCA notices to Bing as well as Google and others,” Microsoft says.

Over the past month alone the software company has asked Google to remove about 800,000 search results. Interestingly, a quick check reveals that some of the URLs Microsoft wants Google to remove are still accessible on Bing, suggesting that not all search engines receive the same notices.

Microsoft’s takedown policies appeared in the news two weeks ago after they asked Google to take down links to their own Microsoft.com site. The company admits to TorrentFreak that this was an honest mistake and says it’s committed to preventing similar errors in the future.

“Microsoft is committed to ensuring that copyright is respected online and that enforcement measures are appropriate and accurate. We and our vendors use several measures to verify the accuracy of information contained in our DMCA notices, including algorithmic and human review of notices,” the company says.

Despite this dedication, errors will be hard to stamp out completely. While we assume that the company will not longer censor the BBC, Wikipedia, the U.S. Government or their own websites, mistakes are bound to happen.

Earlier this week Microsoft’s awkward dual role as both copyright holder and search engine became apparent in a report released by the tech industry group CCIA. The industry association, which lists Microsoft as a member, concluded that demoting “infringing” search results is not the best way to reduce piracy.

While Bing may agree with this assertion, at this point there’s no evidence that Microsoft does.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear.

The document, which describes a government-overlooked “Voluntary Code of Practice” for search engines, was not intended for public consumption but the Open Rights Group obtained it through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

In short, the rightsholders want the search engines to make substantial changes so that pirated content becomes harder to find, or is de-listed entirely. In addition, they want to boost the rankings of licensed content. Below are the three new measures they propose.

• Assign lower rankings to sites that repeatedly make available unlicensed content in breach of copyright
• Prioritize websites that obtain certification as a licensed site under a recognised scheme
• Stop indexing websites that are subject to court orders while establishing suitable procedures to de-index substantially infringing sites

In the document rightsholders explain that they find it inexcusable that some websites – Pirate Bay and Isohunt in particular – are still indexed by all major search engines even though courts have ruled they facilitate copyright infringement.

Not surprisingly, there is no mention of the collateral damage that such a broad filter would bring with it – many artists and other legitimate individuals are known to use these websites to share their works.

The document further details how many of the top search results for music, movies and books currently link to pirated copies. In order to stop this, the rightsholders propose that Google and other search engines systematically assign a lower ranking to possibly infringing pages.

“We propose that in order to further protect consumers and to encourage responsible behaviour among websites, the extent of illegal content on a website should become a factor influencing the ranking of that website in search results returned to consumers,” they write.

This should be doable according to the rightsholders, as Google already influences its search results based on various other criteria, such as the lower rankings that are assigned to so-called content farms.

“Given that Google already de-ranks and de-lists sites that do not meet its own ‘quality guidelines’ or otherwise violate its policies, we do not believe that search engines would face significant legal exposure if they were to de-rank or de-list sites using an objective measure, based on their actions in response to legal DMCA complaints, in pursuit of the legitimate objective of preventing their service being used to facilitate copyright infringement,” they write.

Conversely, it’s argued that search engines should also boost the ranking of legitimate sites for certain ‘relevant’ searches. A list of relevant terms to match to these relevant searches should be provided by pro-copyright groups. In the proposal, the rightsholders give the following example in the case of music files.

“We would propose that prioritisation be enabled for searches that contain any of the following key search terms: “mp3″, “flac”, “wma”, “aac”, “torrent”, “download”, “rip”, “stream” or “listen”, “free”, when combined with an artist name, song or album title contained on a list to be regularly updated and provided to a search engine by a recognised and properly mandated agency representing rights holders for a particular sector, such as BPI.”

Aside from these new proposals, the document also calls on the search engines to improve the censorship measures already in place, such as Google’s keyword filter for their “instant” and “autocomplete” services.

Although the proposal from the rightsholders is not a direct threat as it is a long way from being accepted, it clearly shows that rightsholders see censorship as the way forward. The search engines on the other hand were not impressed and are expected to supply a proposal of their own in a future meeting. Again behind closed doors.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.