RIAA: Google Don’t Combat Illegal Search Results

TThe Communications Vice President of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has said that Google refuse to combat the priority its search results give to illegal sites.

The comments come after the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) found the majority of search results to be for illegal sites, when searching for the Billboard Top 100’s top five artists plus the term ‘mp3’.

Communications Vice President of the RIAA Cara Duckworth Weiblinger said, “It should be unacceptable that Google’s search results prioritize illegal sites…before legal ones, and for them to brazenly refuse to do anything about it.

“According to research done in England, 23% of consumers regularly download music illegally using Google as their means to find the content.”

This comes just months after Dotted Music reported that Steven Marks, Executive Vice President & General Counsel of the RIAA, said, “There is no doubt that Google has taken steps to combat content theft online.”

According to the IFPI search engines receive masses of takedown notices, but “varied response times and delays” are a major problem in the battle against illegal content.

The “varied response times and delays”, cited in the IFPI’s Digital Music Report 2012, are in spite of the RIAA’s gratitude to Google in September 2011 for “developing tools to make it easier for us to submit takedown requests, and for significantly shortening the take down times for links in DMCA notices concerning Blogger or Web Search to less than 24 hours”.

Questions remain as to how a significant shortening of takedown times courtesy of the web’s biggest search engine seem to have had little effect on the IFPI’s findings.

Meanwhile, in a December 2011 ‘report card’ on Google’s making copyright work better online, the RIAA suggested Google “Stop the Self-Serving Alarmist Rhetoric and Engage in Constructive Dialogue”.

Google: Simply not talking to the RIAA?

Samuel Agini is the Editor of Andrew Apanov’s Dotted Music.