TorrentFreak

At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.

Tomorrow thousands of websites will protest the pending PIPA/SOPA anti-piracy bills. Wikipedia, Reddit and many others will do a blackout, and many other sites will organize similar protests. Today, Google announced that it will take part as well. The search engine will not go dark completely, but instead it will put a link on its [...]

Google has expanded its search blacklist to include many of the top file-sharing sites on the Internet, including The Pirate Bay. The changes were quietly processed and appear to be broader than previous additions. Google’s blacklist prevents the names of sites appearing in their Instant and Autocomplete search services, while the pages themselves remain indexed.

The RIAA is upset because Google refuses to remove the popular “MP3 Music Download Pro” app from the Android market. “We sent a takedown notice to Google in August for this particular app, which is clearly being used for illegal purposes, and Google responded that they were declining to remove it from the Android Market,” [...]

With more than 2 billion page views a month and nearly 300 million active users of its BitTorrent-powered download client, Xunlei is without doubt the largest player in the file-sharing space. In an attempt to capitalize on this position the Chinese company, which is partly owned by Google, set its sights on a NASDAQ listing. However, due to copyright concerns and economic headwinds, this plan has now been canceled.

YouTube describes its Content-ID anti-piracy filter as a state-of-the-art technology, but those who look closely can see that in some cases it creates a huge mess. The system invites swindlers to claim copyright on other people’s videos and make money off them through ads. It automatically assigns thousands of videos to people who don’t hold the copyrights, and its take-down process appears to be hugely biased towards copyright holders.

Last year, Google announced that it would begin censoring piracy-related terms from its Autocomplete and Instant services. Under intense pressure from United States music and movie companies, Google is continuing to take measures against piracy. Their latest report on the issue reveals that they have made “considerable progress” against online infringement and that they will deepen their efforts during the months to come.