RIAA wants Google to do its censoring for it

@ 2012/06/04
The RIAA is getting miffed that Google's method of taking down copyrighted material takes too long.

According to Ars Technica, the RIAA wants to issue unlimited takedowns to Google Data.

Writing in its bog, the RIAA blasted Google's updated Transparency Report tool.

That tool shows the major music and video copyright holders were not actually using Google's takedown tools to their full extent. The main user was Microsoft.

Last month the infringement detection company Marketly LLC topped the takedown list with 380,000 takedowns, all on behalf of Microsoft, while the next spots on the list belong to NBC Universal and the British music trade group BPI.

The music industry feels that generating the takedown lists takes too much time and cash. It ends up playing Whack-A-Mole where one link is removed and another identical copy takes its place.

Brad Buckles, executive vice president for anti-piracy at the RIAA, said that in one month Google, and the site in question, received multiple DMCA notices concerning over 300 separate unauthorised copies of the same musical recording owned by one of its member companies.

But the song is still available on the site today, and is still reached by a search result link indexed by Google.

Buckles moaned that if 'take down' does not mean 'keep down,' then Google's limitations 'perpetuate the fraud wrought on copyright owners' by those who game the system under the DMCA.

It seems that the RIAA is just waking up to the reality of how futile it is to try and stop pirates, and rather than wasting its own time, it insists that Google should be doing its job for it.

What the RIAA really wants is for Google to refuse to link to files that have an identical hash to files already taken down. It also wanted to "prioritise" sites like iTunes and Amazon's music store above more dubious destinations.

Buckles said Google also limits the number of links the RIAA can ask it to remove per day. Google has the resources to allow take downs, Buckles said, that would meaningfully address the 'piracy problem it recognises'.

This limitation remains despite requests to remove it, Buckles said.

That is not exactly true. While Google has limits on take downs, Google's Webmaster tools allows only for 1,000 URLs per copyrighted file, and allows ten such files per notice. So in other words, 10,000 URLs.

But the Transparency Report tool shows that they are not even using such tools to their fullest extent.

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