Why Google Is The New Pirate Bay

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f the Swedish site shuts down, search engines could become the new starting points for digital pirates.

This week has offered a hard lesson for pirates, both water- and Web-based: Keep a low profile and your illicit business can flourish. But draw too much attention, and you're likely to get sniped.

On Friday, the trial of the Pirate Bay, the Web's highest-profile source of TV shows, movies and music, came to an end when a Swedish court found the administrators of the site guilty of copyright infringement, sentencing them to a year in prison and more than $3 million in fines.

The verdict comes as a surprise to many who assumed the site, which indexes the "tracker" files that allow users to share video and music, was beyond prosecution in its home country of Sweden. And though the sites' owners say they plan to appeal the decision, it may nonetheless lead to the takedown of the Web's most popular index of peer-to-peer downloads.

But even if the Pirate Bay sinks, putting an end to file-sharing isn't so simple. Waiting in the wings to absorb the site's audience are dozens of second-string bittorrent tracker sites that have avoided the Pirate Bay's level of notoriety, including Mininova, isoHunt and Demonoid. And according to Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard's Business School focused on Internet regulation, that longer-tail assortment of piracy outlets means the starting point for finding pirated content has shifted to an even more resilient source: Google ( GOOG - news - people ).

"Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done," Edelman says. "And if they're prosecuted, they would have much more interesting arguments in their defense."

By searching for pirated music or video, Google users can easily scan a range of lesser-known pirate sites to dig up illicit content. Those looking for the upcoming film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for instance, can search for "wolverine torrent." The first result is a link to file-sharing site isoHunt, with a torrent tracker file that allows the user to download the full film. In fact, searches for "wolverine torrent" on Google have more than quadrupled since the movie file was first leaked to peer-to-peer networks on April 5, according to Google Trends.

Googling more obscure films works just as well. For example, search for "the maltese falcon torrent," and the first result links to Torrentz.com, which in turn links to other sites hosting torrent trackers for the Bogart classic, including Mininova, BTjunkie, Torrenthound and Seedpeer.

Google, for its part, says it is vigilant about removing illegal content. "We are committed to respecting copyrights and have a well-established process under the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] for removing links to infringing content when they appear in our search results," a company spokesman wrote in an e-mail. Yahoo! did not respond immediately to requests seeking comment.

But Google and Yahoo! ( YHOO - news - people ) have always been a starting point for peer-to-peer piracy, says Eric Garland, chief executive of the bittorrent research firm Big Champagne. In focus groups, Garland says he's found that users begin their searches for pirated movies on search engines as often as any source, including the Pirate Bay. That means preventing a user from downloading copyrighted files would mean not simply shutting down the Pirate Bay, but every one of the lesser-traveled sites that Google or Yahoo! provide links to.

"I've argued for years that the real battle rights holders are fighting isn't with individual users or file-sharing sites, but with search," Garland says. "As long as there's robust search that allows people to find the titles they're seeking, you will have this problem, period."

The Pirate Bay's guilty verdict was partly due to its notoriety as a flagrant source of pirated content. The site thumbed its nose publicly at its detractors in interviews with Wired, Vanity Fair,Forbes and other news outlets and its administrators publicly posted their retorts to cease-and-desist letters, including repeated suggestions that media company lawyers perform painful acts on their nether regions with a retractable baton.

Google, on the other hand, may be more legally defensible than any single torrent site. Any piracy-related activity by its users would be dwarfed by the search engine's massive number of legitimate users, says Big Champagne's Garland, and Google is careful to avoid any encouragement of copyright infringing activity.

"Google doesn't call itself 'The Pirate Google,'" Garland says. "If the number of queries looking for copyrighted works is massive, that's only because the number of searches on Google in general is massive."

Google's popularity as a resilient portal for piracy means that even if the media industry were to pursue torrent sites one by one, the search engine would always link to the newest site to host those tracking files, a potentially endless war on torrent sites.

"It's a cat and mouse game," says Harvard's Edelman. "Sometimes the mouse gets eaten. But there are always more mice scurrying around, willing to try their luck."

:source: Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/17/pir...?feed=rss_news