The Pirate Bay is guilty, is Google next?

http://filesharingtalk.com/vb3/pictu...ictureid=17280

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.

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 and index 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.

“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.”

But Google and Yahoo! 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.“

Actually we don’t have to speculate about this. The IFPI, which sued the Pirate Bay, was specifically asked why it did not sue Google. The answer was not because Google was somehow different from the Pirate Bay or that Google was somehow exempt under the law. The sole reason the IFPI gave is because, unlike the Pirate Bay, Google plays along:

“We have approached Google and told them about this. We have asked them if they want to be our opponents or our partners. We have ten people in London working with them on a daily basis [to make illegal music unavailable]. If Google had indicated they would be our opponent, we would have taken them to court.”

In other words, if the Pirate Bay is guilty, so is Google. But Google gets a reprieve as long as it plays the IFPI’s game. But I can’t help but wonder how far Google will bend over to help the IFPI.

:source: Source: Is Google Next?

In the wake of a Swedish court's decision to imprison the operators of The Pirate Bay, a Web site that helps users search for BitTorrent files in the same way that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) handles general Internet file searches, Google wants to make sure everyone understands that it's no Pirate Bay.

Responding to comparisons of Google and The Pirate Bay -- a functional similarity underscored by The Pirate Bay's use on its home page of a Google-style "I'm Feeling Lucky" button -- Marco Pancino, Google's European policy counsel, stresses that Google respects the rights of copyright holders.

"To meet the needs of holders of intellectual property rights, Google has designed a set of procedures for reporting and removing the content on its search engine of copyright infringement," wrote Pancino, as translated by Google, in a blog post penned in Italian.

Forget for a moment that those procedures remain open to abuse, leading to the removal of legitimate uses of copyrighted material. Google, says Pancino, is like a highway and cannot be held responsible for the conduct of bad drivers.

But Pancino's argument isn't entirely convincing because it conflates Google's search function with its content hosting capabilities, as delivered by YouTube and other services. The fact is that Google Search and The Pirate Bay do perform very similar functions.

What makes Google different isn't so much the accommodation is makes to copyright holders in its hosting services like YouTube; it's that the Google user experience when searching for specific file types, like .torrent files, isn't as elegant as The Pirate Bay user experience.

With Google, searching for .torrent files is best done using the filetype: torrent operator, which takes a bit more effort than the typical keyword search. With The Pirate Bay, no search operator is necessary because it only searches for .torrent files.

That's not much of a difference because Google and The Pirate Bay aren't that different. But what little difference there is -- a willingness to consider the concerns of copyright holders -- may be the difference between survival as a business and legal suffocation.

The interesting question here remains unresolved: Should it be illegal to direct people to certain information? And if so, can any such requirement avoid violating First Amendment rights in the U.S.?

Or perhaps more to the point, can any such requirement really be enforced, given the complex nature and global reach of the Internet?

And if it can't be enforced, is it worth bothering to try?

Is shutting down file sharing sites destined to be as futile as Prohibition or the War on Drugs? Or is futility a form of job security for file sharing foes in the litigation and security industries?

That is just plain sad, What next? If you have the words search,Film,P2P on your site you are bad? If they did take to court google and won nothing would be sacred. If you breath and have ever watched a pirate film you are next. Seems a little bit of power goes a long way on the Net,They win 1 big case then a search engine(Google) gets accused of taking people to illegal sites.Its not the search engine at fault you dumb fucks its the people tapping on the keys.