Are Google’s complex counterarguments related to piracy simply falling apart? The company has shown above average ability to filter explicit content from both mainline and image search results, and near-perfect scrubbing of YouTube. Indeed, Google seems perfectly fine with censoring material that could harm its user experience, while remaining perfectly committed to complex takedown procedures for everything else.
Now, someone at Google has said it out loud, whether he meant to or not. Here’s what Google UK compliance manager Theo Bertram recently stated on the topic of takedown requests, which now seem to be surging. The comments came during a heated debate on BBC’s Newsnight involving British label group BPI.
“It’s not for Google to go around the web, judging what is or isn’t legal and I don’t think people would want us to. When people tell us ‘That’s my content on that page,’ we remove the page quickly – we do that nearly 2 million times every month.”
“But our research shows however much you do on filtering or blocking, what is much more effective is to go after the money – to remove the financial underpinnings, the advertising, the payment processes.”
Of course, major labels are no angels either. But it’s become more obvious that attempts to rip down content – through the DMCA or otherwise – are almost perfectly useless.
“Once we’ve told Google 100,000 times that a particular site is illegal, we don’t think that site should be coming above iTunes and Spotify in the results.” -Geoff Taylor, CEO, BPI.
