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: Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Censorship

Google users searching for terms like “torrent”, “BitTorrent” and “RapidShare” will notice that no suggestions and search results appear before they type the full word. As a consequence, there’s sharp decrease in Google searches for these terms.

Initially only a handful of “piracy-related” terms were censored, but a recent update to the blacklist includes nearly all the top file-sharing websites.

Searches referring to torrent sites such as “thepiratebay,” “the pirate bay,” “isohunt,” “torrentreactor,” “btjunkie,” “kickasstorrents,” “sumotorrent,” “btmon,” “extratorrent” and many others are now excluded from ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘. Interestingly, the full url “thepiratebay.org” is still offered as a suggestion.

The new list further includes several cyberlocker websites that were perviously left unfiltered, such as “4shared,” “filesonic” and “fileserve.” Although Google doesn’t censor the content of the websites in question, the Google searches for the affected terms drop significantly as can be seen below.

By voluntarily censoring parts of their search services, Google is trying to keep on friendly terms with copyright holders. The downside to this is that they put perfectly legitimate companies such as BitTorrent Inc and RapidShare at a disadvantage.

There is currently no clear definition of what Google considers to be piracy-inducing, but Google claims that the blacklist helps to reduce online piracy.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano previously told TorrentFreak.

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Cano added.

How positive this difference really is, of course depends on who you ask. IsoHunt owner Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that Google is going down a dangerous path.

“It’s a lot more subtle than the censorship attempts made possible by the pending PROTECT IP and SOPA bills, but it’s still censorship and it starts small. Google is increasingly becoming a self-righteous Big Brother of the Web. So much for ‘Do no evil’,” Fung told us.

A Pirate Bay insider also told TorrentFreak that Google doesn’t live up up to its famous motto.

“”It’s just another step towards censoring their search engine altogether – without a legal basis. We’re also wondering why this happens at almost the same time as they’ve released Google Music – a service where they sell music which in some cases might be found on The Pirate Bay,” he added.

Despite criticism from the public and the businesses affected by their blacklist, Google has said that it will continue to expand its piracy filter. The big question is, where will they draw the line?

Source: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

Xunlei offers a searchable index of 3.7 billion media files which users can download with the proprietary Xunlei software. The company is partly owned by Google and in recent years has evolved into the leading player in the online file-sharing space.

According to in-house reports, the Xunlei client had 291 million active users in February 2011, which makes it the most-used BitTorrent client by far. And with an estimated 2.5 billion page views a month, Xunlei also takes the lead as the most visited file-sharing site on the Internet.

Earlier this year Xunlei announced that it would capitalize on its popularity and go public. Supported by prominent underwriters such as J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank, the company aimed for a listing on NASDAQ, the largest U.S stock market. The prospectus reveals that Xunlei aimed to raise $100 million from shareholders to further grow its business.

Xunlei’s plans were ambitious, especially for a company in the file-sharing space. As it turns out, they may have been a little bit too ambitious. This summer the IPO was put on hold, allegedly due to the poor economic climate, and last week the plans to go public were canceled completely.

Among the reasons cited for the pullback are concerns over copyright. In common with other file-sharing services, Xunlei indexes millions of copyrighted files, and is often portrayed as a “pirate haven” by the entertainment industries. These concerns were also raised in the prospectus, where the protection of third-party copyrights was listed as one of the main challenges.

Last year alone 126 copyright-related lawsuits were filed against Xunlei in China, and the company also reported that the U.S. based MPAA have raised their concerns.

“A law firm in the U.S. who claimed to represent the Motion Picture Association of America, or the MPAA, has recently notified us by phone that certain members of the MPAA may make claims of copyright infringement against us, and requested us to enter into a content protection agreement with these members,” the prospectus reads.

“We have engaged in discussions with the MPAA to understand their request. However, we may not be able to reach a content protection agreement with the MPAA on mutually satisfactory terms and the MPAA or its members may initiate a lawsuit or other proceedings against us, whether or not we enter into a content protection agreement with any of them,” it adds.

Another signal that the U.S. might not be the best market to turn to was given by Google earlier this year. Despite partly owning the file-sharing company, Google banned the term “Xunlei” from appearing in automatic search suggestions because it is heavily linked to piracy.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano previously told TorrentFreak.

Considering the above, and the continued pressure from pro-copyright groups on U.S. lawmakers to adopt more stringent anti-piracy laws, the climate might not be ideal for a file-sharing company on NASDAQ. Whether Xunlei will come back later or try their luck elsewhere is unknown at this point.

Source: Google-Backed File-Sharing Empire Cancels NASDAQ IPO

Content-ID allows rightsholders to upload the videos and music they own to a central ‘fingerprint’ database. YouTube will then scan their site for full or partial matches, and if there is a hit the copyright holder can automatically take it down, or decide to put their ads on it.

Although the above sounds like a fair and honest solution, not everything Content-ID does goes to plan. Of course some errors are expected when pioneering a new system, but the problems are more severe than that. Welcome to the world of YouTube swindlers, mass misattribution of copyrights and an unfair bias towards stubborn copyright holders.

One of the problems appears to be that people with bad intentions can claim copyright on videos they have nothing to do with, and even run ads on them. In the YouTube support forums there are hundreds of posts about this phenomenon, also summarized by the PRV blog recently.

Although some swindlers may indeed be around, most of the “misattribution” problems seem to be the result of screwups and technical limitations. A good example is the case of the Dutch game review site Gamer.nl, owned by the publishing platform Sanoma.

All Game Videos Are Belong to?

A quick Google search shows that the site has ‘claimed’ ownership of more than 10,000 YouTube videos, nearly all game related. However, most of the videos in question have nothing to do with the website. In fact, most are standard game trailers or fan made videos.

So what is going wrong here?

It appears that the Content-ID filter is automatically assigning these videos to Gamer.nl, because the clips produced by the review site also include snippets of trailers and in-game play. In other words, the Content-ID filter is set so broad that official game trailers are assigned to Gamer.nl because Gamer.nl uses footage from the trailers in its reviews.

As a result Gamer.nl is now collecting ad revenue on thousands of videos it has nothing to do with. And bear in mind that the above is just a single example, there are several similar examples which show that it’s a widespread issue.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Gamer.nl to hear their side of the story. They confirmed to us that in their case the videos are flagged by the system, not an actual person.

“Because our productions contain a lot of game footage, YouTube classifies videos with similar footage as infringing. Since this is an automated process we can’t do anything about it,” Gamer.nl’s Joost Wouterse said.

“Unfortunately the YouTube notice makes it look like we are actively flagging material as infringing, but this is not the case. We would never claim ownership on the game footage we use in our productions, but we do of course claim ownership on our full videos,” he added.

Wouterse understands that the confusion caused by the mass-takedowns is unfortunate, but at the same time he’s happy that the Content-ID system allows them to protect their own videos. The big question is of course, whether the thousands of videos that are assigned to them by mistake can simply be seen as collateral damage.

In response to this Wouterse said that YouTube users can file a counterclaim if they disagree with the removal of a video. But this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.

Many users simply do not know whether they are allowed to post parts of a game trailer, or in-game material, and may think the claim from Gamer.nl is legit. Also, since YouTube threatens to ban the accounts of repeat infringers for life, they may not want to cause any trouble.

Bias Towards Copyright Holders?

Adding to the scare factor that might prevent people from complaining, YouTube’s Content-ID system also appears to hold an underreported bias towards copyright holder which sometimes makes bringing back content impossible.

Patrick McKay, candidate for Juris Doctor at Regent University School of Law and founder of FairUseTube.org, told TorrentFreak that there’s a systematic flaw in YouTube’s copyright enforcement system that needs to be addressed. A bias towards copyright holders which goes directly against U.S. law.

According to the DMCA, YouTube should make a video available again if a user disputes a claim from a copyright holder. The copyright holder then has to file a lawsuit to take the disputed video offline again. But this is not how YouTube works according to McKay.

“Under YouTube’s content ID system, the exact opposite is true. After a copyright holder rejects a Content ID dispute, that’s the end of it, and the user’s video is blocked without giving them further recourse under either copyright system—Content ID or DMCA,” he explained to TorrentFreak.

“Content ID thus gives the copyright holder sole authority to decide whether a video is fair use (and most copyright holders will never agree something is fair use), which is completely unfair to users, and ends up trampling fair use rights.”

McKay, who experienced the problem first hand, believes that YouTube needs to address this systematic bias towards copyright holders.

The issues outlined above illustrate that YouTube’s copyright enforcement system and Content-ID filter are not the solid machines they claim to be. Not for regular users at least. Although it’s understandable that mistakes are made when millions of videos are added every month, YouTube should work on getting the basics right.

Don’t let the war on pirates ruin the fun for everyone.

Source: YouTube’s Content-ID Piracy Filter Wreaks Havoc

Rather than focusing purely on taking unauthorized content offline, they would seek to make it unfindable instead. As countries grapple with the various site blocking proposals currently sweeping the world, the music and movie industries have piled pressure on the site that helps people find content above almost any other – Google.

The world’s leading search engine has been fairly responsive too. In January this year they began censoring “piracy-related” terms from their Autocomplete and Instant features, which included words such as BitTorrent, uTorrent, RapidShare, MegaUpload and later Mediafire.

According to an announcement from Google, there’s more to come.

“In December, we announced four initiatives to tackle the problem of copyright infringement online. We’ve made considerable progress on each front, and we will continue to evolve our efforts in all four areas in the months to come,” says Kent Walker, Google’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel.

Censorship of search results is just one of the four initiatives, Google also wants to action takedown requests more quickly in response to rightsholders who say the process takes too long.

“We promised to build tools to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and Web Search), and to reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less for submissions using these new tools,” Walker writes.

“We built the tools earlier this year, and they are now being successfully used by more than a dozen content industry partners who together account for more than 75% of all URLs submitted in DMCA takedowns for Web Search.

“Our response time for these partners is now well below the 24 hour target. In the coming months, we will be making these tools available more broadly to those who have established a track record of submitting valid takedown requests,” says Walker.

Google has also been criticized for not only making “pirate” sites findable, but actually funding them through their AdSense advertising programs. Google does in fact already ban file-sharing sites from using their ad scheme, but there are so many sites that often some get through. Google wants to tighten this up.

“In recent months, we have worked hard to improve our internal enforcement procedures. In April, we were among the first companies to certify compliance in the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB’s) Quality Assurance Certification program, through which participating advertising companies will take steps to enhance buyer control over the placement and context of advertising and build brand safety,” notes Walker.

“In addition, we have invited rightsholder associations to identify their top priority sites for immediate review, and have acted on those tips when we have received them.”

Google also says it continues to make efforts to improve the visibility of authorized music content in its search results, such as through Music Rich Snippets.

As noted by the UK’s BPI last year, the industry would like Google to move links to ‘authorized’ music stores higher up their results too, although that is yet to emerge.

However, as highlighted in our July report, the search engine filtering carried out by Google has had a profound effect on the search volumes of affected keywords.

Whether or not this has the net result of pushing authorized music sources higher up the results when a user searches remains to be seen.

“There is plenty more to be done, and we look forward to further refining and improving our processes in ways that help both rightsholders and users,” Walker concludes.

Source: Google Reports “Considerable Progress” In Fight Against Piracy

According to Google, the blacklist is an effective tool to curb online piracy, even if the terms themselves are not exclusively linked to copyright infringement.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano previously told TorrentFreak.

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Cano added.

The question is however, does this filter indeed make a difference?

In the past we’ve pointed out that many people discover piracy-related services based on Google’s suggestions. So, if Google’s censorship attempt would indeed decrease the number of actual searches for the filtered keywords, one could argue that it ‘works.’

To find out what effect the anti-piracy filter has had we decided to take a look at Google’s own search trends, and the results are quite astonishing.

Below are the search trend graphs for several forbidden keywords and all show a massive drop in search volume after the anti-piracy filter was implemented in January.

The graph above reveals that searches for BitTorrent quickly dropped by half, and as of today it remains that way. The graph below shows that a similar pattern can be observed for MegaUpload searches, which had been rising month after month until Google put it on its blacklist.

These search trends are the same for pretty much all the censored keywords. Even searches for the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent dropped to the lowest volume since 2006 after the filter was installed.

Below is the graph for Mediafire searches, one of the latest keywords that was added to the blocklist at the end of April.

Of course the drop in search volume doesn’t mean that there’s a significant drop in actual piracy rates, but the patterns above are surprising to say the least.

Although we had predicted a slight drop in search traffic because of the anti-piracy filter, we never expected it to have this much of an impact. All the more reason for the copyright lobby to suggest banning even more keywords.

While the copyright lobby will count this outcome as a win, the arbitrary filters are not necessarily in the best interests of the Internet as a whole. Google’s lack of transparency about the list of censored keywords and the fact that dictionary words such as ‘torrent’ and company names such as ‘RapidShare’ are included is a worrying development, to say the least.

Source: Google’s Anti-Piracy Filter Is Quite Effective

A perfect illustration of John Gilmore’s famous quote: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Releasing the browser add-on was a statement more than a technical breakthrough, but it had a bigger impact than the MAFIAA Fire team could have ever hoped for. ICE asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site but Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

This victory for the MAFIAA Fire team encouraged them to come up with more anti-censorship tools. Today the team lived up to that aim by releasing a new Firefox add-on named “Gee! No evil!” which targets Google’s recent censorship initiative.

Starting a few months ago Google began filtering “piracy-related” terms from its ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘ services. The unpublished blacklist includes “torrent”, “BitTorrent”, “uTorrent” and “RapidShare” and was updated with the term “Mediafire” last week.

According to Google, the blacklist is an effective tool to curb online piracy, even if the terms themselves are not exclusively linked to copyright infringement.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano told TorrentFreak.

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Cano added.

But not everyone agrees that censorship is the preferred solution here. The MAFIAA Fire team, for example, believe that Google has simply caved into pressure from the entertainment industry.

“Although typing a few extra letters is not a big deal for most, the fact that a non-innovative industry like the music industry has so much clout to pressure one of the icons in one the most innovative industry in the world was too much for us to ignore,” a MAFIAA Fire representative told TorrentFreak.

“We had to do something about it, just out of principle,” he added, and so today they released the “Gee! No evil!” add-on for Firefox. As with the redirector add-on, a Chrome version may be released later when enough donations come in.

The plugin reverses Google’s filter and adds the banned keywords to Autocomplete as soon as the user types in the first letter. It also kicks in if the second keyword is on the blacklist, so if a user types “Linux t” it will suggest “Linux torrent.”

In addition to restoring censored keywords, MAFIAA Fire are also considering promoting other P2P services and cyberlockers with the add-on in the future, the opposite of what Google is attempting to accomplish. Site owners who want to support the initiative are welcome to apply.

With “Gee! No evil!” the MAFIAA Fire team have once again made a censorship effort defunct. But Google is not their main target, the pro-copyright lobby (MAFIAA) is what they are after. And their message is clear.

“Our message to the MAFIAA is this; the law of unintended consequences is very much alive. You took down Napster and what’s taken its place is far bigger. You are trying to censor little bits and pieces, but you inspired us to release more tools that will make you cringe for a very long time.”

“Censoring common words like “torrent” to help an outdated business model is not the right approach… and where does it stop? Who decides what goes on this slippery slope?” the MAFIAA Fire representative told TorrentFreak.

The above comment rightfully accentuates how subjective and risky censorship often is. While the U.S. Government is supporting tools to provide anonymous Internet to citizens of repressive governments, they also support drastic censorship measures at home. Although some may argue that it’s not fair to compare apples and oranges, censorship is censorship no matter how you frame it.

Source: Google Censorship Initiative Thwarted by ‘Gee! No Evil!’ Add-On

Google users who now search for terms like “torrent”, “BitTorrent” and “RapidShare” will notice that no suggestions and search results will come up before they type the full word. This week this list was expanded with (at least) one new term – Mediafire.

By censoring parts of their search services, Google is sending out a strong signal that they are committed to combating online copyright infringement. Thus far, however, the list of forbidden words still appears to be arbitrary.

Why add the name of the file-hosting service Mediafire but not direct competitors such as Hotfile and Fileserve? Why delist the BitTorrent client uTorrent but not its main competitor Vuze?

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Google spokesman Mistique Cano reiterated what the company announced in a blog post late last year. “We are removing terms from Autocomplete where we find that those terms are closely associated with infringing results.”

Google could not provide us with a full list of banned terms or elaborate on the selection process.

“It’s not easy [to share the keywords] and the list will undoubtedly change over time,” we were told.

“When evaluating terms for inclusion, we examine several factors, including correlation between the term and results that have been subject to valid DMCA takedown notices,” Google’s spokesman added.

Although Google is not able to inform the public what terms they deem to be closely connected to infringing behaviors, the company does believe that their measures could help to decrease online piracy.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online.”

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Google’s spokesman said.

The above is interesting, since Google decided to fight a request from a French music rights organization last year, who demanded that Google would implement a similar filtering measure. Apparently they changed their minds.

Aside from censoring piracy-related terms, Google is also preventing various other terms from appearing through their Autocomplete and Instant services. Typing in “tits”, for example, is subject to the same treatment as the piracy-related words.

“We also take a similar approach to a narrow class of terms related to pornography, violence and hate speech. These steps do not remove any results from search results or prevent users from typing any term they choose into their queries,” Google’s spokesman explained.

Admittedly, the impact of the censoring of the Autocomplete and Instant features are not that dramatic. However, Google’s willingness to interfere with parts of their search service to combat piracy will motivate rights holders to request even broader filters.

Also, Google’s definition of “narrow changes” is worrying when a dictionary word such as “torrent” and trademarks of legitimate businesses such as “BitTorrent” and “RapidShare” are blacklisted. The big question is, where will they draw the line?

Source: Google Expands Piracy-Related Keyword Filter

The United States (with its PROTECT IP bill) and the United Kingdom (with its Digital Economy Act), are both preparing what they believe could be their best chance at a silver bullet approach to piracy – the complete blocking of ‘infringing’ domains.

Yesterday though, they discovered that apart from the usual legislative stumbling blocks, an Internet giant intends to hinder their progress.

Google is set to come out in opposition of cumbersome DNS-style blocking, perhaps giving a boost to embattled sites like The Pirate Bay and Newzbin2. These sites are at the very top of the domain-blocking wishlists of both the U.S. and UK, but neither of them are in ideal positions to mount legal challenges of their own.

Speaking after this keynote speech at Google’s Big Tent conference in London, The Guardian reports Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as voicing clear opposition to web censorship.

“If there is a law that requires DNSs [domain name systems, the protocol that allows users to connect to websites] to do X and it’s passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it,” Schmidt said.

“If it’s a request the answer is we wouldn’t do it, if it’s a discussion we wouldn’t do it,” he added.

Schimdt went on to compare the notion of website blocking with methods used by the Chinese to censor the Internet, cautioning that when those further east see that the west aren’t opposed to censorship when it comes to achieving their particular aims, it might only encourage further crackdowns.

“I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems,” Schmidt said. “So, ‘let’s whack off the DNS’. Okay, that seems like an appealing solution but it sets a very bad precedent because now another country will say ‘I don’t like free speech so I’ll whack off all those DNSs’ – that country would be China.”

Google has a very much push-pull relationship with the content industries when it comes to infringement and potential ways of stopping it.

On the one hand Google has been helping to stop its Adsense platform being utilized by ‘pirate’ sites and has helped to partially filter some of its search features to remove ‘infringing’ suggestions. On the other it has been both help and hindrance to Hollywood by getting involved in their ongoing dispute with BitTorrent indexer isoHunt.

Yet when Google, a massively powerful organization which seems to be able to make most things turn to gold on the web, tried to reach licensing agreements with the music labels for its music locker service, it came away frustrated.

The message here is that Google is not on the side of the entertainment industries, nor on the side of the pirates. Like all companies with that all-important bottom line, it will do whatever suits its best interests. Time will tell what they are.

Source: Google Boss: We’ll Fight Anti-Piracy Blocking Laws

In February Google filed an amicus brief (third party testimony) at the Appeal Court, in the hope that the court would consider Google’s opinion on the case. The MPAA was against a Google contribution, but despite these concerns the Appeal Court has now allowed the search engine’s testimony to be added to the case.

Although Google did not dispute isoHunt’s liability in their testimony, the company stated that some of the reasoning in the District Court verdict went too far, and Google wants to see it scrapped in the appeal.

“While in agreement with the result reached in this case, Google is concerned that some of the reasoning offered by the district court goes too far and would upset the careful balance between copyright protection and technological innovation struck by the Supreme Court and Congress. Particularly because this case is not a hard one, it should be decided narrowly,” Google wrote.

The search giant addresses various issues they feel are not needed to arrive at the verdict, but can negatively impact other services on the Internet. Several of these conclusions are the result of suggestions made by the movie studios, which Google claims are misplaced and incorrect.

Google wants to address these issues because they fear it may otherwise lead to a negative outcome for themselves.

The Appeal Court agreed to accept and consider the amicus brief last month. This is the first time that Google have got involved in a BitTorrent case which is significant itself, but interestingly enough neither the MPAA nor isoHunt are happy with Google’s submission.

In a response to Google’s brief, isoHunt says it agrees with Google’s arguments that the District Court verdict is full of “fatal errors” and “omissions”. However, it doesn’t agree with Google’s conclusion that isoHunt is liable for copyright infringements by some of their users. isoHunt’s lawyer therefore asks the court to reject the latter arguments.

“Defendants submit that Google’s confusing arguments and fallacious reasoning should not obscure the importance of issues presented by this case. Defendants have proposed a practical way to deal with such issues; but Google, like plaintiffs, propose nothing other than affirmance of a factually flawed and legally ill-founded District Court Decision.”

The MPAA also responded to Google’s testimony, and was even less pleased to see the company chime in.

“Google is not a disinterested amicus. Google itself is a defendant in suits charging certain of its business units which intentionally promote infringement. Google’s arguments as amicus reflect its litigation interests in obtaining a legal ruling that facilitation of infringement, even if shown to be intentional, may still be immune from copyright liability.”

The MPAA’s legal team then goes on to refute nearly all arguments made by Google. The search engine wants to scrap all of the District Court’s conclusions regarding liability that could eventually be used against Google, but the movie companies clearly disagree.

“The Court should reject Google’s pleas for immunities for businesses that intentionally facilitate copyright infringement,” MPAA’s lawyers conclude.

Although Google weighed in on the isoHunt vs. MPAA case in self-interest, the mere fact that they got involved signifies the importance of the case. To some it may ‘just’ be a dispute between a BitTorrent site and the MPAA but if affirmed the District Court ruling may have far-reaching consequences for hundreds of other web-services.

After filing the amicus brief Google’s role in the case has likely ended, but isoHunt and the MPAA will continue their battle in court.

There’s a hearing planned in early May where we will find out more about where the case is heading. Interestingly, this hearing is scheduled on the same day and in the same court as Veoh’s appeal hearing. Another DMCA case, but one where the service provider was not held liable.

Source: Google, MPAA and isoHunt Clash in Court

Google’s search engine also gets thousands of these notices, where copyright holders ask the company to remove certain listings from its search results. Although time-consuming, the process usually works well. Sometimes, however, things can go horribly wrong.

This week Google decided to remove the homepage of the plagued sports streaming site Rojadirecta from its search index. The site already suffered its fair share of copyright troubles when the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized its .com domain early February, but apparently that didn’t mark the end of the misery.

As previously noted, Rojadirecta was an unusual target for a domain seizure because it’s owned by a Spanish company and has twice been declared legal by Spanish courts. Nevertheless, the domain was seized and Rojadirecta decided to continue doing business on the .es domain name they already had in place.

During the last few days that alternate domain was suddenly dragged into yet another copyright dispute. This time it involved Google and their decision to remove the domain from its search results.

Acting on a complaint from Major League Baseball (MLB), Google quickly removed listings for the site’s homepage. Although one can debate whether Rojadirecta – which only indexes links to streams hosted elsewhere – is infringing any copyrights, those who take a good look at the complaint will see that both MLB and Google made huge mistakes.

Firstly, the DMCA takedown notice was not directed at Google search, but at Google’s advertising platform Adsense. MLB didn’t ask for the Rojadirecta.es site to be removed from the search results at all, they simply wanted it to stop serving Google ads. And even if it was directed at Google search no listings should have been removed, since in their takedown notice MLB doesn’t point at a specific infringing location as a correctly formatted notice requires.

To make matters even worse, MLB also made a big mistake as Rojadirecta doesn’t even serve any Adsense ads. Apparently some people at MLB confused the external sites Rojadirecta links to in an iframe for the Rojadirecta site itself. The images that MLB sent with the takedown notice confirm this suspicion.

TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of Rojadirecta who was baffled by the actions of both Google and MLB. “From our experience it is clearly too easy to be removed from the search engine,” he told us in a comment.

Of course, this is not the first time that a mistake has lead to the removal of a website. In 2009, Google removed The Pirate Bay’s homepage from its search results by mistake, but this error was quickly corrected. Also, for Rojadirecta this is not the first erroneous removal either, something similar happened to the .com domain in 2007.

It’ll be interesting to see how Google responds to this error, if they do at all. Perhaps their employees should watch Google’s own “copyright school” video, perhaps they might learn a thing or two?

Source: Google Censors Alternate Domain of Seized Streaming Site, By Mistake

Although Google did not dispute isoHunt’s liability, it is clearly concerned that some of the reasoning in the District Court verdict went too far, and wants to see it scrapped in the appeal.

As the case moves along Google continues to play a central role. In the reply brief filed by isoHunt, a study brought to the table shows that the majority of the files that can be found through its search engine are also available via Google.

“Neither Google nor Plaintiffs mention the 95% overlap between torrents available through Defendants’ systems and torrents available through Google and/or Yahoo!,” isoHunt’s legal team writes (pdf) to the Court of Appeals.

With this data isoHunt claims that what they do, Google does too, and perhaps even better. To a certain degree this is a valid point. Aside from indexing and caching hundreds of millions of pages with directs links to torrent files, Google also has a filetype command which allows users to search only for .torrent files.

In its quest for a jury trial, isoHunt suggests that they, but not Google, are hunted down and scapegoated by the movie studios. To put it in even stronger terms, isoHunt is indirectly telling the court that Google may be the largest torrent search engine on the Internet.

“Defendants might argue to the jury that it is unfair to hold Defendants liable if Google, unbothered by Plaintiffs, provides torrents to ten or twenty times the number of users that visit Defendants,” the reply brief reads.

It adds, “Defendants might argue that Defendants are being scapegoated. Defendants might argue that holding Defendants liable while ignoring Google would not curtail infringement.”

The reply further responds to several of the arguments made by the movie studios and eventually asks the Court of Appeals to reverse the permanent injunction and summary judgment. Instead, isoHunt favors a jury trial which it deems to be more appropriate considering the nature of the case.

“Defendants submit that upholding the right to jury trial is the best way to deal with rapidly-changing technology. Judicial rulings influence practical decisions for many years but cannot track changes in Internet technology.”

Commenting to TorrentFreak, isoHunt founder Gary Fung said that a trial by “jury of one’s peers” would be be fitting in more way than one.

Source: Google’s the Largest Torrent Search Engine, isoHunt Tells Court

In a show of openness, big companies such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Digg began sending DMCA takedown notices they received to Chilling Effects. In 2010 the clearing house received more than 12,000 such cease-and-desist notices which in turn contained thousands of links to content to be removed. At times this archive makes fascinating reading, as highlighted today by occasional TorrentFreak contributor SearchFreak.

The URL http://chillingeffects.org/dmca512c/notice.cgi?NoticeID=31773 shows a DMCA notice sent by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation to Google which contains a list of URLs which allegedly link to the movie Avatar. Fox demanded that Google should take them all down from its index, which it appears to have done.

However, if one enters this URL into a Google search, the only results listed are where other pages refer to this URL. The actual page with this URL is nowhere to be found. Indeed, as can be seen from the screenshot below, Google has removed the result due to a DMCA takedown complaint.

Fortunately we can see what this complaint was about and who sent it by, ironically, going to ChillingEffects. The DMCA complaint in question was sent by Fox to Google and contains dozens of links its anti-piracy division has culled from the web, allegedly linking to their movie Avatar.

However, deep into the complaint Fox has demanded that Google take down links to two pages on Chilling Effects (1) (2). Their crime? Containing links to the Avatar movie.

So, let’s have a little recap since this is becoming like an episode from Soap.

Chilling Effects is setup to stop the ‘chilling effects’ of Internet censorship. Google sees this as a good thing and sends takedown requests it receives to be added to the database.

Fox sends takedown requests to Google for pages which the company says contain links to material it holds the copyright to. Those pages include those on Chilling Effects which show which links Fox wants taken down.

Google delists the Chilling Effects pages from its search engine, thus completing the circle and defeating the very reason Chilling Effects was set up for in the first place.

Fox has repeated this somewhat ridiculous ‘error’ several times (1) (2) (3) (4) but they are not on their own. It seems that the UFC have also been trying to have ChillingEffects notices removed (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) but currently they remain listed by Google.

While the Fox takedowns happened a while ago, those sent by UFC are just a few weeks old. Let’s hope that when receiving these requests in future Google simply throws them in the trash, where they belong.

Source: Fox DMCA Takedowns Order Google to Remove Fox DMCA Takedowns

The Court ordered the owner of isoHunt to start censoring the site’s search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by the MPAA, or cease its operations entirely in the U.S. The injunction was the result of isoHunt’s protracted court battle with the MPAA that started half a decade ago, in 2006.

IsoHunt owner Gary Fung decided to implement the filter, and is now up for an appeal at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. There, he hopes to get the law on his side and quash the previous District Court ruling. IsoHunt argues that they’re just like Google – a neutral search engine – and hopes the court will decide that the keyword filter is needless censorship.

The appeal is currently ongoing. Two months ago isoHunt filed its opening appellate brief to the Court, requesting better protection from such mass copyright lawsuits for both isoHunt and other search engines alike. Even Google may face similar censorship threats if the injunction holds up, isoHunt lawyer Ira Rothken argued.

Google has been keeping an eye on the legal battle between the MPAA and isoHunt as last week, out of nowhere, the company unexpectedly got involved in the motion for summary judgment appeal. The search giant, which has always stayed far away from these types of cases, filed an amicus cuiae brief (third party testimony) at the Appeal Court.

“This cases raises issues about the interpretation and application of the safe-harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512 et seq. (“DMCA”) and common-law rules governing claims for secondary copyright infringement. Google has a strong interest in both issues,” Google’s counsel writes.

Google asked both isoHunt and the MPAA studios for their consent in filing the amicus curiae brief. Interestingly enough, the movie studios didn’t want Google to take part, while isoHunt was more permissive. That doesn’t mean, however, that the brief is in support of isoHunt’s case, not at all.

In fact, Google specifically states that it agrees with the District Court’s conclusion that the isoHunt search engine induced copyright infringement. According to Google isoHunt can be seen as a true “pirate” service and no objections are made against the Court’s final decision.

What Google is worried about is the reasoning the District Court used to reach its conclusion.

“While in agreement with the result reached in this case, Google is concerned that some of the reasoning offered by the district court goes too far and would upset the careful balance between copyright protection and technological innovation struck by the Supreme Court and Congress. Particularly because this case is not a hard one, it should be decided narrowly,” Google writes.

Google argues that there is plenty of evidence that isoHunt encouraged its users to download copyright infringing content. However, in the discussion on the relation between inducement and liability the Grokster standard is ignored, especially the question of whether the inducement led to direct infringements or not.

Google wants to address this because they fear it may otherwise lead to a negative outcome for themselves.

Another major issue Google addresses is the District Court’s analysis of the DMCA’s safe harbor and the inducement of copyright infringement. According to Google this discussion can severely impact ‘legit’ businesses like YouTube.

“As with its treatment of inducement, the district court’s discussion of the DMCA reached the right result but in a problematic way. The court complicated a straightforward DMCA case by wading into an unnecessary discussion of the relationship between the statutory safe harbor and judge-made principles of secondary liability, including inducement,” Google writes.

Google states that it is apparent that isoHunt doesn’t fall under DMCA safe harbor protection, since it failed to meet several of the requirements, so a detailed discussion and conclusions with regard to liability and the DMCA are not needed.

“In short, the question whether a defendant is eligible for DMCA protection is distinct from whether the defendant is liable for inducement under Grokster. Those two questions should not be conflated, as the district court appears to have done,” Google writes.

Google further addresses various issues that they feel are not needed to arrive at the verdict, but can negatively impact other services on the Internet. Several of these conclusions are the result of suggestions made by the MPAA movie studios, which Google claims are misplaced and incorrect.

Although isoHunt’s owner was initially happy to see that Google got involved in the lawsuit, the end result is a huge disappointment. Google clearly doesn’t agree with the assessment of isoHunt that they are ‘just like Google’.

Google taking part in the MPAA vs. isoHunt appeal is mainly done in their own interest, but in doing this they make some valid points which are important for torrent sites also.

Google notes that the DMCA comes before any secondary infringement liability, such as inducement for example. In its ruling the District Court said that inducement disqualified isoHunt from DMCA safe harbors, which is strange as that completely defeats the purpose and definition of “safe harbour” for online service providers.

TorrentFreak contacted isoHunt owner Gary Fung for a response. Fung appeared to be disappointed, but couldn’t comment on the implications the Google brief could have. His lawyer Ira rothken was asked for a comment as well, but didn’t respond. It is now up to the Appeal Court to decide whether Google’s suggestions and comments will be taken into consideration.

Source: Google Gets Involved in BitTorrent Search Engine Lawsuit

The process works as follows. The copyright holders hire companies such as BayTSP and MediaSentry to track down people who share certain titles on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. These companies then join the swarm and request files from others. When someone shares a piece of the file with them, they log the IP-address, look up the ISP and send out an infringement notice automatically.

Most of the notices are sent out to the larger ISPs who are then asked to forward them to the customers in question, but search giant Google has also been receiving quite a few. A search on ChillingEffects – a site that collects some of the DMCA notices that are sent to Google – reveals that more than 100 of these automated warnings were sent to Google in the past several months.

Since Google also offers Wi-Fi hotspots in some cities, most of the infringers are not actually sharing material directly from Google headquarters. However, in some cases these warnings do appear to be aimed at Google employees. This is an awkward situation for a company that is trying to help out the entertainment industry, and has even revealed a censorship policy towards certain BitTorrent-related terms.

But there is more. If we believe some of the notices sent to Google, the company is at risk of losing its connection to the Internet.

“Copyright infringement also violates your ISP’s terms of service and could lead to limitation or suspension of your Internet service. You should take immediate action to prevent your Internet account from being used for illegal activities,” the movie companies write in various letters.

The above text is of course intended for average consumers, but in this case it appears to be directed at Google. Not that we (or Google) have to worry about it much. Although the copyright holders use strong language, these kind of notices are nothing more than a warning, and they never lead to legal action.

At the bottom of each notice there is generally some info about the alleged infringer, in the following format.

Infringing Work: The Green Hornet
First Found: 2 Feb 2011 16:57:21 EST (GMT -0500)
Last Found: 2 Feb 2011 16:57:21 EST (GMT -0500)
IP Address: 216.239.XXX.XXX
IP Port: 14077
Protocol: BitTorrent
Torrent InfoHash: 42708AA384CF93EC6B67E6CEFB6E27B32362F689
Containing file(s): The Green Hornet TS(iPod.Zune.PSP).torrent (442,480,008 bytes)

Of the 100 latest infringement notices received by Google for sharing copyright works, most of them are associated with IP-addresses used by Wi-Fi customers while a few point to Google’s headquarters. Even though they are posted on ChillingEffects (some redacted, some with full IPs) it is impossible to tell whether the company has forwarded them to employees, if these are traceable at all.

The movie companies, however, do have some advice for Google.

“An MPAA website, www.respectcopyrights.org, offers step-by-step instructions to ensure that your Internet account is not being used to violate the copyright laws. Also, the site can point you to an array of legal choices for enjoying movies and TV shows online. You can also learn there how theft of motion pictures and TV shows damages our economy and costs thousands of Americans their jobs,” they write.

The most recent notices received by Google were sent on behalf of Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures for the illicit sharing of The Fighter and The Green Hornet respectively. In total, Google has published 20+ of these warning letters in the last 30 days.

Source: MPAA Snags Google Downloading Torrents, Threatens to Disconnect

Without a public notice Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of keywords for which auto-complete is no longer available. Although the impact of this decision does not currently affect full search results, it does send out a strong signal that Google is willing to censor its services proactively, and to an extent that is far greater than many expected.

Among the list of forbidden keywords are “uTorrent”, a hugely popular piece of entirely legal software and “BitTorrent”, a file transfer protocol and the name of San Fransisco based company BitTorrent Inc. As of today, these keywords will no longer be suggested by Google when you type in the first letter, nor will they show up in Google Instant.

All combinations of the word “torrent” are also completely banned. This means that “Ubuntu torrent” will not be suggested as a user types in Ubuntu, and the same happens to every other combination ending in the word torrent. This of course includes the titles of popular films and music albums, which is the purpose of Google’s banlist.

TorrentFreak contacted BitTorrent Inc. for a reaction, and Simon Morris told TorrentFreak that he believes the scope of this filter is too broad.

“We respect Google’s right to determine algorithms to deliver appropriate search results to user requests. That being said, our company’s trademarked name is fairly unique, and we’re pretty confident that anyone typing the first six or seven letters deserves the same easy access to results as with any other company search,” Morris said.

“A quick search for ‘BitTorrent’ currently returns a variety of legitimate and useful links, including company information, our software, our open-source protocol, and more. What Google may not realize is that our technology is used for many purposes that provide significant value to the technology industry, companies, artists and consumers at large,” he added.

What is most surprising about the new filter is that the keywords appear to be picked arbitrarily. It includes BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent and Xunlei, but not BitComet and Vuze. While cyberlockers such as RapidShare and Megaupload are banned, prominent sites such as 4shared, HotFile and MediaFire are not.

In addition, all the names of popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay are not included in Google’s banlist either. BitTorrent’s Simon Morris agrees that this is odd, to say the least.

“There’s no reason for Google to throttle search results for our trademarks, including BitTorrent, µTorrent and torrent. Indeed, they do still enable autocomplete for many third-party clients that use the BitTorrent protocol, including BitComet, BitLord, and even sites like The Pirate Bay and Isohunt.”

Morris further points out that the inclusion of Xunlei is a little hypocritical since Google is one of the investors in the Chinese BitTorrent client.

“We’d also like to point out that while Google doesn’t enable autocomplete for Xunlei (China’s largest software client that uses the BitTorrent protocol) Google did invest $5 million in the company in 2006, according to reports,” Morris says, adding, “We sincerely hope Google will recognize the value of BitTorrent and reevaluate this decision expeditiously.”

RapidShare is not pleased with Google’s new filter either, at least not with its current scope in today’s roll-out.

“We knew about Google’s plans for quite a few weeks now. We embrace that certain search suggestions will not put a wrong complexion on RapidShare anymore, but we are concerned that at the same time the legitimate interests of our users will also be affected. We believe it was the wrong decision to remove the term ‘RapidShare’ from the search suggestions,” RapidShare told TorrentFreak.

“RapidShare is one of the most popular websites worldwide. Every day hundreds of thousands of users rely on our services to pursue their perfectly legitimate interests. That is why Google has obviously gone too far with censoring the results of its suggest algorithm. A search engine’s results should reflect the users’ interests and not Google’s or anybody else’s,” the company added.

Indeed, RapidShare has certainly touched a nerve here. It is clear that this filter is the result of pressure from the entertainment industries, which is not at all in the interests of users. Now that Google has begun proactively censoring their services for commercial reasons, more companies will demand the same. At the same time, the entertainment industries will continue to pressure Google to go even further, and censor the actual search results.

Apparently Google has decided that its users should not be searching for the keyword BitTorrent, so why list any results then? It’s the beginning of the end.

Jamie King, the founder of Vodo – a platform where artists can share their work with million of people at no cost – agrees with this assessment. Searching for one of their perfectly legal releases on Google used to suggest the word “torrent” with a link to the download page, but not anymore.

“Google already showed it will censor for the highest bidder — China Inc. springs to mind. Now it’s doing it for MPAA & Co.,” King told TorrentFreak.

“I guess it’s simple: our favorite search monopoly cares less about helping the thousands of independent creators who use BitTorrent to distribute legal, free-to-share content than they do about protecting the interests of Big Media in its death throes.”

Indeed, Google is going down the wrong path by willingly and broadly censoring its services to please a few big companies. This is not the way to get rid of piracy, it’s the way to a corporate controlled Internet. Google may have been proud to leave China because of its political censorship, but it should be ashamed of promoting commercial censorship worldwide.

Source: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

As we have argued before, Google is probably the number one reason why millions of people are using BitTorrent sites today. This trend hasn’t gone unnoticed to the music industry either, and today The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) went as far as blaming Google and other search engines for being a main source for online piracy.

“Search engines are as popular as P2P applications as a source of illegal downloads,” BPI stated in a report today. “It’s not hard to see why. Key in the name of any popular artist, add search terms like ‘mp3′ or ‘download’ – both neutral terms – and typically the large majority of results that appear are blatant links to illegal downloads.”

As an example of this alleged facilitating behavior by Google, the BPI performed a few test searches. They found that the majority of the top Google search results for popular singles pointed to ‘illicit’ sources.

“In a single week in November, BPI test searches were made on Google for the UK’s top 20 singles or albums, followed by ‘mp3′. On average 17 of the first 20 Google results for singles and 14 of 20 search results for albums were links to known illegal sites.”

The search results are just one part of the search engine problem though. In addition, the BPI points out that services such as auto suggest and Google’s instant service may drive people towards ‘rogue’ or ‘illegal’ sites.

“The predictive search tools offered by some search engines go further by actively directing users towards free illegal downloads by auto-completing artist searches with additional phrases like ‘torrent’, or providing specific references to unlicensed sources like Mediafire or mp3raid.”

Although the BPI is right in their analysis, they also know that the search results are merely the result of a set of algorithms. Piracy related searches float to the top and are suggested because that’s what people tend to search for. Google has no active role in it.

This is what the BPI hopes to change. They suggest that search engines should actively censor their search results, and move links to ‘authorized’ music stores higher up. According to the music industry this would be a very effective tool to decrease piracy.

“The music industry continues to press search engines to help consumers stay on the right side of the law and has suggested concrete solutions such as prioritising music search results in favour of legal online services such as those highlighted by the Music Matters campaign,” the BPI writes.

In part, these lobbying efforts have already been successful. Two weeks ago Google announced several upcoming changes that would benefit copyright holders. Among other things the search mogul said that it would censor ‘piracy’ related words for appearing as auto-complete suggestions.

For Google this is a slippery slope to be on, and the next step could very well be the sort of commercial censorship the music industry is suggesting. And if the music industry is successful, other industries will soon follow. The question is, however, if that will solve the piracy issues or just hide them.

Source: Record Labels Blame Google For Piracy, Hint At Censorship

One could argue that Google has been one of the greatest contributers to the success of BitTorrent. Unlike other filesharing applications such as Frostwire, Ares and eMule, the .torrent download links are listed on billions of search engine friendly pages on the Internet.

We dare to argue that if BitTorrent didn’t rely on web-based indexing sites, it would be nowhere as popular as it is today. Today, thousands of new people continue to be introduced to it by Google alone. Features such as Google Suggest and Google Instant play a key role in this discovery process.

Just take a look at the two screenshots of Google searches for Wall Street Money Never Sleeps and Resident Evil Afterlife, and see what Google suggests as a search phrase after one enters the movie titles into the search box.

The search suggestions are based on the search habits in one’s geographical locations, so they may not be the same for everyone. However, the ‘torrent’ suggestion usually makes it into the top 5.

Due to BitTorrent’s popularity, a movie title followed by the word ‘torrent’ is often the first suggestion, before words such as trailer, review and soundtrack. This isn’t a decision made by the Google staffers, but a reflection of the fact that more people search for ‘torrent’ in combination with a movie title (or music and software tiles) than these other words.

Earlier this year Google rolled out a new feature that may boost the conversion of new people to BitTorrent to even more. With Google Instant users directly see the results of the search phrases they type. This means that for a lot of movies merely entering the title and a space will give then a list of download links on torrent sites.

When we do a search for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World for example (with Google Instant enabled), we immediately get a list of download links on various BitTorrent sites when we enter a space. It’s needless to say that this may pique the interest of people who have never heard of BitTorrent.

Of course, Google is not to blame for any of this. They have their automated algorithms and because BitTorrent is used by millions of people, ‘torrent’ related search phrases often rise to the top of suggested searches. In a way, the same can be said for torrent search engines – should the operators really be blamed for how a subgroup of their visitors use their sites?

Source: What’s That Torrent Thing Google Keeps Suggesting?

Over in Russia the pressure being placed upon site owners has increased dramatically in recent times, so much so that yesterday some of the countries largest web companies published an open letter directed at the entertainment industries and lawmakers.

Google, mail service Mail.ru, social networking site Vkontakte, and search engines Yandex and Rambler released a joint statement Friday asking copyright holders to cease legal action against them over unauthorized content stored or linked to by their services.

The companies say that it is end users who are responsible for the posting of copyright works and as such it is they who should be held liable. Furthermore, they claim it is impossible to monitor millions of users to ensure their every act is legal.

The entertainment industries do not accept this line and insist that web companies should keep their systems free of copyright works, if necessary by employing teams of people to do so.

The five companies say that the law has failed to keep up with developments on the web and clarification is needed. Unlike other parts of the world, current Russian legislation does not indicate who can be held accountable for unauthorized content placed on Internet services.

“In Europe, the USA and other countries, the limitation of liability of information intermediaries in such situations was legally settled more than ten years ago,” the companies write.

In order to help bridge this gap, the site owners are offering rightsholders the opportunity to settle disputes indirectly with alleged copyright infringers. Once a complaint is received, site operators would suspend access to the material in question and inform the user/uploader of the complaint. The user would then have the chance, through the site operator, to dispute the claim with the rightsholder.

“We believe that, with the above procedure, the owners of Internet services should not be responsible for the content posted by users,” the companies write in the letter.

Having this type of takedown policy would hopefully avoid situations such as the one Vkontakte currently finds itself in. The social networking giant is currently being sued by Gala Records for around $22,000 because users uploaded songs by Russian pop stars to the site.

Last week, a British citizen was arrested over his involvement with the Mulve software which allowed users to make a search and download music from Vkontakte’s servers.

The letter comes at a time when a bill concerning Internet regulation, which contains a proposal that service providers could be taxed in order to compensate rightsholders for perceived losses, is under Government review.

Source: Don’t Blame Piracy On Us, Say Google and Leading Russian Web Firms

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton granted Google’s motion for summary judgment, ruling that Google is protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provision. Effectively, this means that YouTube doesn’t have to remove any clips unless they are asked to do so by copyright holders.

“If a service provider knows of specific instances of infringement, the provider must promptly remove the infringing material. If not, the burden is on the owner to identify the infringement. General knowledge that infringement is ‘ubiquitous’ does not impose a duty on the service provider to monitor or search its service for infringements,” Judge Stanton wrote.

In a response, Google claimed the judgment to be a victory for all the people who ‘share’ on the Internet. “This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other,” the company wrote on its blog.

This judgment is obviously a huge win for YouTube and other video hosting services, but it also sets an important precedent for BitTorrent sites. Google’s YouTube shows striking similarities to torrent sites as it allows users to submit content. The only difference is that YouTube actually hosts the uploaded files, whereas torrent sites only link to content indirectly through .torrent files.

The Pirate Bay aside, nearly all torrent sites work closely together with copyright holders to ensure that their rights are respected. Like YouTube, IsoHunt and others have strict notice and takedown policies and swiftly remove .torrent files pointing to infringing material when they are notified by copyright holders.

Despite the similarities, BitTorrent sites haven’t been very successful in court thus far. Using the same arguments as Google did in its case against Viacom, Mininova and isoHunt have both argued in court that they were protected by a DMCA(-like) safe harbor, but both eventually lost their case.

The good news is that both isoHunt and Mininova have still options to appeal, and with yesterday’s landmark victory in hand their chances of winning may have increased.

If anything, BitTorrent sites should be seen as less infringing than video hosting sites because they only link to copyright infringing content indirectly through .torrent files. If Judge Stanton’s decision is translated to BitTorrent sites, it means that under safe harbor protection sites like isoHunt and Mininova would operate legally and wouldn’t have to use filtering mechanisms to prevent users from uploading ‘infringing’ torrents.

Viacom, meanwhile, isn’t done with Google and Youtube just yet. “We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court,” the company said in a statement.

Source: Google Scores a Big Victory for BitTorrent Sites

Yesterday Techdirt asked the question: Is BPI Trying To Setup Google For Copyright Infringement Lawsuit?

The article centered around a June 11, 2010 takedown notice sent to Google from the UK’s BPI. Groups such as the BPI, IFPI and MPAA send these notices on a regular basis and in a normal set of circumstances they’re so prevalent that they would hardly make news. However, Techdirt noted an interesting angle to this particular takedown demand.

Rather than supplying very specific URLs where infringing material could be located as is the norm with these type of requests, the BPI provided whole site URLs such as http://megaupload.com, http://sendspace.com and http://hotfile.com.

“My guess is that this is trying to set up Google, so that Google is officially ‘on notice’ that these nine sites host infringing content, and while Google will almost certainly take down the links to the specific files listed, it’s quite likely that similar files will quickly be found elsewhere on those sites — and BPI may then try to claim that Google should automatically know how to block those other files,” wrote Masnick.

Now, in a June 10 takedown request sent to Google, it seems the IFPI could be trying a similar tactic with the search giant, but being rather more clear about it, this time in connection with The Pirate Bay.

In a fairly lengthy preamble, the IFPI describes The Pirate Bay as “an internet-based service that facilitates copyright infringement on a massive scale” and one which provides access to “several hundred thousand infringing content files, including movies, games and software as well as copyright sound recordings owned by IFPI.” It also describes the guilty verdict handed down to the four Pirate Bay individuals in their 2009 criminal trial and references legal action to have the site blocked in Denmark and Italy.

A huge list of specific URLs which link to torrents is attached to the request and Google is asked to remove these from their search results – but IFPI goes further.

In light of the serious violations of copyright facilitated by The Pirate Bay service, and in accordance with Google’s policies (see http://www.google.com/dmca.html andhttps://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=58&ctx=sibling) we are asking for your immediate assistance in removing from your index, or otherwise disabling access to via your search engine, URLs linking to the website for The Pirate Bay including but not limited to the URLs specified in the attachment to this notice. [emphasis ours]

IFPI continues with:

In sending this letter we are seeking to ensure that infringing content is made inaccessible or removed from the Internet as quickly as possible through your cooperation. However, please note that we do not admit that we or the IFPI Represented Companies are responsible for detecting infringing material and notifying you of it.

Could this be similar situation to the one Mike Masnick referred to in his BPI article, but this time laying the ground for The Pirate Bay?

“Part of the DMCA safe harbors is that you need to remove content if you have ‘specific knowledge’ of the content,” he wrote. “This is at the center of the Google-Viacom lawsuit. Google claims it needs to know the specific files that are infringing, while Viacom claims that once Google knows that ‘content x on YouTube’ is infringing, it should be required to find and block all such content x’s, even if Viacom has not informed Google where they are.”

It remains to be seen how Google responds to this request but since attempts to take down The Pirate Bay have been an almost complete failure, removing it from the world’s most important search engine could be the next best step.

Source: Music Biz Wants Google To Stop Linking To The Pirate Bay

Despite this ironic situation Trackhub’s owner Pedro has kept the service online, but this may change soon if that decision is left up to Google. Citing complaints from third parties, Google is demanding that Pedro closes his website or else they promise to do it for him.

“We have received numerous complaints regarding your application at trackhub.appspot.com The complaints appear to be a result of your application providing a BitTorrent tracking service which is distributing allegedly infringing content,” Google wrote to Pedro.

“Please disable your application’s BitTorrent service or otherwise filter the service so that it no longer distributes infringing content within 48 hours or we will be forced to remove your application from the App Engine service,” Google’s email continued.

Pedro, the operator of Trackhub was baffled by Google’s email because he has never received any complaints while Google claims to have received ‘numerous’. More importantly, even the most imaginative mind should have trouble seeing Trackhub as a BitTorrent tracker.

The site itself merely acts as a ‘hub’ that redirects BitTorrent users to a working tracker, it has absolutely no role in the downloading process itself. Despite this, Google claims that the Trackhub service has violated App Engine’s program policies.

The section Google refers to prohibits users to “Send, upload, distribute or disseminate or offer to do the same with respect to any unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, fraudulent, infringing, obscene, or otherwise objectionable content,” which does not seem to apply to Trackhub at all.

“The Google Team needs to read the spec for BitTorrent and take a look at what Trackhub does in order to make an educated decision,” Pedro told TorrentFreak. “The source code for Trackhub is very short and is available at Github,” he added.

At the time of writing Trackhub has once again exceeded its daily usage volume, but the site has not yet been disabled by Google. Pedro told TorrentFreak that he wont take it down himself and that he awaits Google’s next move.

Source: Google Threatens To Shutter BitTorrent Tracker Fail-Safe

BitTorrent’s leading role can be partly attributed to its technical superiority, but there are other, perhaps even more defining factors that have propelled BitTorrent’s popularity. One could argue that Google has been one of the greatest contributers to its success.

Unlike competing filesharing applications, BitTorrent has a dominant presence in search engine results. A site like isoHunt for example, has 13,500,000 million indexed pages on Google and The Pirate Bay has 3,760,000. All public torrent sites combined, there are probably over a billion torrent pages indexed by Google alone.

It is needless to say that this overwhelming web presence has created a huge advantage for BitTorrent compared to P2P applications such as Limewire, that mostly rely on searches within the application. Over the years, millions of people have been introduced to BitTorrent through search engines like Google.

We’re now at a point where torrent sites top the search results for nearly search phrases related to downloading movies and music. For example, a Google search for “Shutter Island download” returns 6 torrent sites in the top 10 results and no legal authorized download options. The same is true for nearly all similar searches.

While Google and other search engines have helped BitTorrent popularity to a great extent, this could not have been possible without the people who developed the torrent indexes in the first place. That is where another key aspect of BitTorrent’s popularity, which also ties into the web-based nature, plays an essential role. Money.

BitTorrent sites can generate some serious revenue, enough to sustain the site and make a decent living. In general, ad rates per impression are very low, but thanks to the huge amounts of traffic it quickly adds up. This money aspect has made it possible for sites to thrive, and has also lured many gold diggers into starting a torrent site over the years.

Initially, most torrent sites were operated by students or hobbyists with a passion for filesharing and coding. Most of the larger sites today started out that way, but in the years that followed they were joined by groups of people that are mainly interested in the cash, not so much in offering a good service to their users.

Despite this darker side, the possibility to monetize torrent sites has been essential to the success and the survival of BitTorrent. Without a return on investment, nobody would spend tens of thousands of dollars each month to keep a large site or tracker online.

All in all it is fair to say that BitTorrent is as popular as it is right now simply because it’s web-based and findable through search engines. Although we don’t have any numbers to back it up, it would not be an outrageous claim to say that most of the people who use BitTorrent today were introduced to it through a Google search.

Source: Why Google Made BitTorrent a Success

The filtering process is not automated and DMCA takedown requests are generally reviewed manually. Sometimes this leads to errors, such as when Google removed The Pirate Bay’s home page from its search results last October.

The Pirate Bay homepage does not list any torrent files as most people know, so there was little doubt that the filter was applied in error. Google later admitted this mistake and after blaming it on an incorrect takedown request, the company finally said that an “internal error” was the reason behind the Pirate Bay ban.

As promised, The Pirate Bay homepage soon reappeared in Google’s search results and things went back to the way they were. However, fellow torrent site BTJunkie is now in a similar position as The Pirate Bay was a few months ago. BTJunkie’s homepage no longer comes up in Google.

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org,” Google explains at the bottom of the search results.

The DMCA complaint Google links to appears to come from Fox and refers to the blockbuster movie Avatar. At the time of publication the full complaint is not yet available so we were unable to verify whether it listed BTJunkie’s home page.

Unlike The Pirate Bay, BTJunkie does list several torrents on its homepage including Avatar which is among the most downloaded torrents on the site. These lists are all dynamically generated and constantly changing of course, and it is unclear whether that will warrant a removal from the search results.

TorrentFreak discussed the issue with the owner of BTJunkie who told us that he has sent a counter notice to Google (picture below). Thus far Google has not responded on the issue, but we will update this article when there’s an official statement on BTJunkie’s removal.

Source: Google Removes BTJunkie From Search Results

Google’s YouTube shows even more similarities to torrent sites as it allows users to submit content, with the only difference being that YouTube actually hosts the uploaded files whereas torrent sites only link to content indirectly through .torrent files.

In the last year, three of the largest torrent sites – The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt – were all taken to court by copyright holders for assisting in copyright infringement, and all three sites lost their cases to some degree. Strangely enough Google has never said a word about these cases other than to distance themselves from The Pirate Bay team after they were sentenced.

Despite this attempt at demarcation, three Google employees are now in a very similar position as the aforementioned torrent site operators. An Italian court just handed out suspended jail sentences to three Google employees for ‘allowing’ users to upload a video that invaded the privacy of a third person.

The three employees were not aware of the upload before they were notified by the police, but they made it possible, much like they make it possible to upload copyrighted content. The similarities with torrent search engines are striking.

It is needless to say that Google is not amused by the court ruling. While the company kept its mouth shut in response to the legal actions surrounding the torrent search engines, they now speak of an attack on “the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”

“Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming,” Google’s Matt Sucherman wrote in a blog post yesterday.

This response from Google does indeed seem logical, and we can easily apply the same reasoning to sites that index and host .torrent files. The operators of torrent sites and video sites can’t possibly verify and screen the content of all uploaded files. This is something the site’s users should be held accountable for.

This doesn’t mean of course that the site’s operators should ignore the law. The Pirate Bay for example has always been very responsive to requests from the police concerning illegal material linked to by the site. IsoHunt goes even further as it actively works together with copyright holders and Mininova even allowed copyright holders to prevent infringing torrents from being re-uploaded in the future.

According to Google such policies should be good enough to operate a site like YouTube without running into legal trouble.

“European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy,” Sucherman writes.

So here we have Google in a similar position as most torrent sites are in. Although the Italian verdict is outrageous the obvious upside is that unlike the torrent sites, Google has the financial power to successfully fight the verdict. According to former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, Google got what it deserved.

“It’s good that someone takes on Google for a change. Let them take the heat for once – and let them make sure that other sites that they’ve previously had no problem filtering, that basically do the same as them, don’t end up in this shit the next time,” Sunde told TorrentFreak.

“I think it’s good that time has finally caught up Google. Maybe now we have a level playing field here. They have to take the fight as well. Previously they only said nice things about how important the Internet was, and then ignored all of the things going on. Even supporting them – China for instance,” he added.

“A big player like Google has the financial muscles to fight this thing. And we all know that Italy is just full of rules made by Berlusconi, for Berlusconi,” Sunde said, adding, “That fascist needs to go.”

Google has indeed committed itself, and said it “will vigorously appeal this decision.” The whole case revolves around the question of whether or not the operators of media portals and search engines should be held accountable for the actions of their users.

In recent months Italian courts have clearly answered positively to this question. They have opened the door for a nationwide block of file-sharing sites and with yesterday’s decision file and video hosting sites are not safe any longer either. So the next question is, can Google secure a safe haven for torrent sites?

Source: Can Google Secure a Safe Haven for BitTorrent Sites?

In the months that followed its traffic exploded and the site soon settled itself among the ten most popular torrent sites, with more than a million unique visitors a day.

NowTorrents attributed its success mostly to Google. The owner had spent a lot of effort in optimizing the site for search engines and this certainly paid off, as 90% of the visitors came through the search mogul. But two weeks ago, everything changed. Suddenly the traffic wave from Google was reduced to a trickle, causing the number of visitors to plunge.

NowTorrents’ founder told TorrentFreak that he tried to contact Google about the issue, but the company said it couldn’t comment on the rankings of search results. It’s clear that the site has not been removed from Google, as all of its pages remained indexed. However, NowTorrents pages do show up much lower in the search results, an indication that Google may have penalized the site.

It is not unlikely that Google decided to downgrade NowTorrents because it was a little ‘too well’ optimized, so to speak. Google has been known to punish sites that try to artificially inflate their search rankings. Although the site’s founder is not aware of anything that might have upset Google, the traffic drop was irreversible.

For the site’s founder there was no other option than to start over from scratch. In fact, he took the opportunity to relaunch the site under a new name, hoping to get back some of the Google juice. He was already working on a new version of the site, so the timing couldn’t have been better.

The new and improved NowTorrents has been renamed to TorrentFly today, and regular visitors will notice quite a few changes to the site’s layout and search functionality.

One of the new features is that members can not only can pick which sites TorrentFly should search, but also in what order the results should appear. Another advantage for members is that they won’t see any advertising.

“Aside from the layout change and added features, TorrentFly has a ton of minor changes and improvements to the backend, which should result in better and faster search results,” the site’s founder told TorrentFreak.

Indeed, the search results on TorrentFly appear within a few milliseconds and the changes to the site are a step in the right direction. Now all TorrentFly can hope for is that Google stays friendly.

Source: NowTorrents Becomes TorrentFly After Google Penalty

Torrent sites have been the target of these removal requests more than once, and Google usually removes the ‘infringing’ torrent detail pages from their search results fairly quickly.

According to Google the altered search results are caused by DMCA complaints the company receives from copyright holders. One of the most recent takedown requests, sent by a company that protects the copyrights of porn producers, was targeted at The Pirate Bay.

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed X result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org,” Google users can now read beneath the search results for The Pirate Bay and similar terms.

Now this wouldn’t be that odd if only a few adult film torrents were removed from the search results. However, those who take a closer look will notice that the takedown request resulted in a ban of the Pirate Bay frontpage from the search results.

As can be seen from the picture above the rest of the Pirate Bay domain is still indexed, but not the frontpage. This is not the end of the world of course but since there are no torrents listed on the Pirate Bay frontpage, Google has clearly made a mistake here.

The details of the takedown notice that was sent by Removeyourcontent are not yet available, but it may be that it included the Pirate Bay frontpage and that Google removed it without checking whether the claim was legitimate.

TorrentFreak has contacted Google for a response, but thus far we haven’t heard back from them. If it is indeed a mistake we assume that it will be corrected soon. Perhaps they can delete the scammy PirateBay.com site while they’re at it?

Update: Destined Enterprises, the company that operates the site that sent the takedown requests according to Google, claims they haven’t asked Google to remove the Pirate Bay homepage from the search results (although they are not completely sure). In a letter (pdf) the company’s lawyer has sent to Google a few minutes ago, they request a copy of the takedown notice, fearing that someone else might use their name to send these takedown notices.

Update 2: Google has lifted the Pirate Bay ban. The homepage appears in the search results again. The DMCA notice in question is also published and the Pirate Bay homepage is not listed there, so it’s likely that Google made a mistake.

Update 3 Google says the mistake was due to “takedown request that erroneously listed thepiratebay.org.” The company that sent the takedown notice denies this. “They are blaming us but it’s ok. We are used to it,” they told TorrentFreak.

Source: Google Removes Pirate Bay Frontpage From Search Results

On the one hand this offers newcomers to BitTorrent a familiar interface to find all sorts of torrent files directly from the uTorrent homepage. The search engine uses Google’s search algorithms to find .torrent files on sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. BitTorrent Inc. profits from this through search based ads that Google adds to the search results.

This seems to be a win-win situation for everyone but for reasons unknown, Google no longer allows uTorrent to use the custom search program. When entering a keyword into the search box on the website the following error is returned (see picture). BitTorrent Inc. has now removed the search box but they have no clue why they have this problem with Google.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak that there is indeed a problem but that they yet have to find out the details. At this stage we can only guess at the reasoning behind the lack of functionality. Most BitTorrent sites are not allowed to serve Google ads because they link to copyrighted content, but since uTorrent was only linking to these sites indirectly through Google’s own search engine, this seems less likely.

Yet there are more BitTorrent oriented sites that have faced similar problems. The Pirate Google, another website that uses Google’s custom search had similar problems recently.

uTorrent’s search has been down for around 5 days now, so one could expect a technical issue to be resolved by now, but until we hear back from Google the actual cause is open to speculation. The net effect is the same though – uTorrent’s revenue from this source isn’t rising as planned.

Update: We heard from “The Pirate Google” admin that Google did indeed block inbound queries from his site. He found a temporary workaround but this proves that Google is actively blocking (these) torrent related sites. Don’t be evil?

Source: Google Custom Search Cuts uTorrent Off

While the added search is not a particular good way to find torrents, its addition to the site is an interesting move by BitTorrent Inc. Not so long ago, uTorrent removed the search boxes to sites like Mininova and isoHunt from their client, as per requests from copyright holders. However, since BitTorrent Inc. closed its video store, there is now no need to please Hollywood and they are free to link to torrent sites again.

Last December we reported that BitTorrent.com added a torrent search engine that works with Ask.com, and uTorrent.com now follows with a Google powered search engine. Neither site hosts any files, they simply act as a meta-search engine. Below is an example of a search for aXXo on uTorrent. Ironically, the Google ad that appears here links to a uTorrent scam site.

Google-powered search engines are nothing new, though. There are a few dozen sites that use Google’s coop program, such as TorrentScoop. All these sites display ads from Google’s Adsense program, ads that are not allowed on ‘regular’ torrent sites because they would violate Google’s terms of service. In fact, a few weeks ago isoHunt lost their Google ad feed which ran through Ask because some advertisers complained.

Double standard or not, the search engine on uTorrent’s homepage is bound to get some decent traffic. Let’s hope that they will keep an eye on the scammy ads though, we know from experience that it requires continuous attention.

Source: uTorrent Adds Google Powered Torrent Search

Among other tools, M-Lab will run the Glasnost application developed by the Max Planck Institute. Last year, tests performed with the Glasnost tool revealed that Comcast and Cox were actively interfering with the BitTorrent transfers of their subscribers.

The Java applet developed by the Glasnost project uploads and downloads data via BitTorrent for a few seconds, and compares that to your regular download speed. It detects if your ISP is limiting all BitTorrent traffic, or just the flow of data through well known BitTorrent ports. All in all this tool should be able to tell you whether your ISP is messing with BitTorrent traffic or not.

In their quest for Net Neutrality, Google is backing the M-Lab project with 36 servers in 12 locations. Google will also provide network connectivity for the tools hosted on M-Lab. The servers Google has promised will be rolled out over the next few months, while the PlanetLab Consortium manages the tools hosted on the site.

The project aims to reveal the throttling practices of ISPs worldwide and put an end to all the secrecy. “Transparency has always been essential to the Internet’s success, and everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they’re getting when they sign up for broadband,” says M-Lab, explaining the ideals behind its website.

Among the other Net Neutrality tools hosted on M-Lab is a diagnostic tool which allows user to test their connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of any slowdowns. More tools will be added soon, Google powered.

Source: Google Joins Fight Against BitTorrent Throttling ISPs

Google has a policy of not displaying ads on sites that are involved in or linked to copyright infringement, with many torrent sites previously excluded from the scheme. Of course, some still carry Google ads, purely because Google is unaware of the nature of those sites, but with IsoHunt the situation is different. On IsoHunt the Google ads aren’t directly served by Google, but by Ask.com, a Google AdWords ‘reseller’.

Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, works with several other BitTorrent sites. Only on IsoHunt have they displayed search based ads that came from Google AdWords campaigns. They have been doing so for several months, perhaps years, but up until now nobody complained, or knew.

Several companies whose ads appeared on IsoHunt, including online bookseller Bokkilden and search engines Sesam and Kvasir don’t have that much to complain about. However, there are others who are less happy.

Media giant Sony BMG and Norwegian online music store Platekompaniet have both reacted strongly to the news that their ads have appeared on IsoHunt. Artist sponsor StatoilHydro called the situation “regrettable”, adding “We would certainly prefer not contribute to the financing of sites like this.”

In a statement, Jan-Henrik Ohme, head of digital marketing at Sony BMG said “We have stopped the section of the campaign that goes to the third party until Google cleans up the issues. We have contacted Google, and they took immediate action.”

For its part, Google Norway has apologized for the situation, and said that the advertisers should not be held responsible for the placement of the ads, since due to the 3rd party involvement, they had no way of knowing where they would appear. The campaigns are not limited to Norway though, and Ask.com certainly has something to explain to Google.

Source: Controversy as Google Ads Appear on IsoHunt

On a free account, users of Google’s App Engine can host 500MB data, and serve up to 5 million page views a month. This is more than enough for a medium sized BitTorrent site. At the moment it is not possible to upgrade these limits, since paid accounts are not yet available, but this might change in the future.

Both sites are totally ad free, and great resources to search for torrents. V0rtex currently searches 12 BitTorrent sites, including established sites such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. The site itself has a clean look and feel, and the search results are sortable by date, peers, seeds and more.

TorrentFreak spoke with Reda, the developer of the site, who told us that he started the project to learn how to code. “It was really fun and exciting to learn Python and Javascript/Ajax,” he said. His goal is not to compete with the big players though. Reda hasn’t even bothered to register a domain name for it since it was mainly a learning experience.

This is different for the other BitTorrent meta search engine hosted on Google’s App Engine, which does have its own domain. TorrentTab, which is a project of David Sánchez, is also using Google’s architecture to search for torrents. The site currently searches 10 sites, and presents the search results in tabs using Google Ajax Feed API.

David told TorrentFreak that he initially started the site on his own Internet connection. When the site started to attract more visitors, he had to find an alternative. Google’s App Engine seemed to be a great solution, so he recoded the site in Python and moved it over to Google’s infrastructure.

Unlike some of the other meta-search engines that use tabbed search results, TorrentTab is not merely loading the results from the other sites in a frame. Unfortunately there are no sorting options for the search results, which makes it hard to find the best seeded files, or the latest uploads.

Although V0rtex and TorrentTab are are not revolutionary in terms of features or functionality, it is great to see that Google is providing a free playground for BitTorrent startups. It’s always good to see some variety.

Source: Google Powered BitTorrent Seach Engines

The graph clearly shows that Azureus was the most searched for client until the beginning of 2007, followed by BitComet. From then on, uTorrent took over and it continued to grow while BitComet and Azureus searches slowly decreased. Search statistics are of course only an indirect measure of the popularity of a BitTorrent client, but the graphs seem to follow the same pattern as actual usage statistics which we have reported before.

Worldwide

Another measure that is worth looking into is the geographical distribution of the searches. It is interesting to see how popular BitComet is in Asia. Currently, it is (based on searches) the preferred client in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia and Hong Kong. However, uTorrent is most often searched for in most countries, especially in Moldova. Azureus, on the other hand, is a popular search term in Greece.

US

If we take a closer look at the US (you can do this for any country), we see that pretty much every BitTorrent client is popular in California. The graph shows that most uTorrent searches (relatively) come from Kentucky and California, Milpitas in particular. Azureus seems to be quite popular in Ohio, specifically in Salt Lake City. BitComet is the least searched for client of the three, but gets most search traffic from New York and California again, Monterey Park on this occasion.

Overall I would say that based on other statistics, the search data is a pretty close match to the actual BitTorrent client preferences. Google’s insights on the regional differences certainly have something to add to what we already know, but keep in mind that they are only search statistics. Most of all, it’s a fun tool to play around with on a Sunday afternoon when there’s not much news to go around.

Source: Google’s Insights on BitTorrent Clients

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a year. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

Source: Top Torrent Sites Ranked by Google

The owner of SumoTorrent told TorrentFreak that he discovered that A search on Google for sumotorrent now triggers the following message at the bottom of the results page:

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.”

A search for other BitTorrent sites like Torrentspy and Torrentreactor comes up with the same message (note. the sites are still indexed but some results are removed). Strangely enough, for torrentreactor it only shows up for a search on the .com domain.

According to Google the filtered search results are caused by DMCA complaints , but the owner of SumoTorrent is a little surprised by this. He has no clue why the “content owner” didn’t contact him directly because he generally processes takedown notices within 24 hours. Unfortunately the link Google provides to the complaint in question doesn’t work, and a search on ChillingEffects.org doesn’t really help much either.

One of the few BitTorrent related DMCA complaints Google received concerned Paris Hilton’s famous . This notice was sent by Jim Salomon, the brother of Rick Salomon who used to date Paris. The complaint is hilarious, Jim even complains why it takes Google more than 4 hours to remove the .torrent in question. Funny or not, eventually Google decided to remove the .torrent file in question from their search results.

What Google has done isn’t really that revolutionary because most administrators of BitTorrent sites take down torrent files themselves upon request. However, the main reason for this is that they don’t want endless legal battles. They see it as a service to the content owners to remove the .torrent files if a decent request is made. But I kind of hoped that Google would make a stand here, wishful thinking so it seems.So what do you think? Should Google filter their results like this?

Source: Google Filters Torrents From Search Results

Up until now, we weren’t completely sure if this was going to be the YouTube killer that TPB fans everywhere have been talking about. But a statement published today on The Pirate Bay Blog outright confirms it:

“YES – we’re going to do a video streaming site. It’s true. It’s in the works being done right now and as usual we put a bit of Pirate Bay mentality behind every project we do.”

And it’s exactly that “Pirate Bay mentality” that, in our opinion, is going to make this site a winner. Think YouTube without Google constantly pulling down copyrighted videos.

Some clever TorrentFreak readers and TPB fans managed to locate the URL of the upcoming YouTube competitor. It is: thevideobay.org. All you can see on the site is a plain page with two lines of text:

only open for beta- and dev-testers.
some is live, most is not. we will open for public when done.

Stay tuned!

Source: The Pirate Bay to Launch YouTube Competitor

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

As you can see, ‘mininova’ was the 9th most searched for word on Google this year. There could be many reasons behind this, but the most obvious seems to be the fact that most people, including myself, initially type in ‘mininova.com’, but then realise that the site at that URL is not what we were looking for, and head to Google to find the real mininova located at mininova.org.

That’s definitely not the sole reason though, mininova has been steadily growing and is ranked among the top 3 BitTorrent sites along with The Pirate Bay and Torrentspy. In March of this year, mininova was leading the race, but in May we published an Alexa traffic rank comparing the three sites which put Torrentspy in the lead. Shortly after that, mininova passed 400 million downloads mark.

It’s quite obvious that more and more people are starting to use BitTorrent. Getting ranked as one of the most queried words on Google is possibly one of the highest honours any website can receive. It indicates that more than just a small niche of people are out there searching for it. We at TorrentFreak believe that mininova has become popular by word of mouth, more than anything.

Source: ‘Mininova’ the 9th Most Googled Word in 2006

Lars Ilshammar, an information-technology historian who recently suggested Sweden to impose a fee similar to the one proposed in France said to the IHT:

“The process for change has now begun in Sweden, but it’s clear that this problem cannot be solved by one country alone,” said “More countries have to come out of the closet.”

One thing is for sure. Things will, and must change. Don’t expect that the copyright restrictions will disappear, but we will definitely need more “rights” to copy. It almost seems like the easier it gets to share things, the harder the restrictions get. I mean, come on, how insane are those people if they request to take down clips of children dancing on their favorite song on youtube or google video? Uma Suthersanen, a professor of international copyright law at Queen Mary, a college at the University of London sums it up quite nice:

“The way it works now, it is a little as if you give the consumer a lollipop, and then smack them over their heads, saying that they can’t use what they’ve bought,”

Go Pirates.

Source: Sympathy for the Pirate

can you open two BitTorrent apps together

Well, you probably can, but even more intriguing… do you know any

secret BitTorrent websites

Well, I don’t. But since they’re secret. And another search, probably related

which is the best paid torrent site

Some people have too much money. But let’s go on with a more basic question

is torrentspy legal

And the Cheaters of course

hack bit torrent to increase share ratio
cheat upload speed BitTorrent
hack seeds torrent connect only

But there are still some good people out there

How do I speed up my BitTorrent upload?

Source: Googled