Google turned out to follow through on its last month promise “to prevent terms related to piracy from Autocomplete.”
Indeed, Google is keeping its promise made in December 2010 to “better address bad apples using the web to violate copyright.” As you might remember, Google’s 4-part plan for “Making Copyright Work Better Online” contained a promise to prevent terms associated with online piracy from Autocomplete. That’s exactly what the search giant did.
However, the Google team seems to choose terms without any customer feedback or sensible criteria. For example, the search engine banned the terms like uTorrent, BitTorrent, MegaUpload, and RapidShare. Meanwhile, it didn’t include The Pirate Bay, Vuze, Mediafire, or Transmission in the ban list. In other words, BitTorrent and uTorrent are actually the sole BitTorrent applications banned from Autocomplete. Unsurprisingly, BitTorrent Inc. found the censorship far too aggressive, particularly when Google singled out its legally trademarked name of all things.
BitTorrent Inc. Vice-President pointed out that although they do respect the search giant’s right to set algorithms to deliver proper search results, the company’s trademarked name is actually fairly unique. That’s why BitTorrent Inc. is sure that anyone typing the first several letters must get the same easy access to search results as with any other organization. Besides, there’re lots of likewise legal BitTorrent search results that will now be affected by Google’s new filter.
BitTorrent Inc. is not the only company showing its discontent. MegaUpload has also found itself on the wrong side of the filter. The guess is that now the cyberlocker should take time to rethink its recent comments made about Google also being a “rogue website”.
And, of course, RapidShare will surely find the censorship particularly offensive, because German and US courts have repeatedly ruled that third parties, but not the service itself, are responsible for copyright infringement.
Meanwhile, it’s quite interesting to see what Google will do next. It has already established a baseline for preventing terms “closely associated with infringing material” from those shown in Autocomplete, but it’s not clear whether it will leave it as is, or add more of them and which ones.
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