Google Piracy Policy Under RIAA Fire

TThe RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America) has called for Google to take its commitment to fighting online piracy “more seriously” after Google announced that a new copyright section would be added to its Transparency Report.

Google has this time come under fire for its attitude to take-down requests, whose current the RIAA has repeatedly called into question. The RIAA claims that Google’s policy regarding take-down requests results in continued copyright violation.

Take-down requests are requests for the removal of stolen content from websites, and, according to the RIAA, Google has placed restrictions on the number of take-down requests that can be submitted each day. According to the RIAA, Google has the resources to effectively tackle the problem of piracy but has left the restriction in place in spite of requests to have it removed.

RIAA

The RIAA claims that Google has received requests to remove 1.2 million links from 1,000 copyright owners in one month, but that this figure’s significance is, in context, undermined by the fact that Google has identified nearly 5 million new links posted in just the last month in searches for free mp3 downloads of just the top 10 Billboard tracks. The RIAA’s concern is that the constraints that Google has placed on take-down requests and other tools they employ in the battle against piracy are “well below” the required level needed to fight piracy.

Since its establishment two years ago Google’s Transparency Report has shown the availability of Google’s services across the world, but Google’s addition of a section devoted entirely to copyright is a sure sign that it is ready to take copyright infringement “more seriously”.

However, the RIAA has also claimed that Google’s Transparency Report includes misleading use of statistics, and has claimed that Google’s calculation of a how much of a site is infringing is “flawed and of little value on its own”. The RIAA attributes this miscalculation to the fact that Google has constraints in place which mean that the number of take-down requests received is artificially low, resulting in the false claim that “the DMCA notices it has received for a site represent less than .1% of the links it had indexed for the domains at the top of this list”.

Finally, the RIAA has complained that Google’s policy entails that even if links are taken down, they are not necessarily kept down. The RIAA implicated Google in this, arguing that if “take down” does not mean “keep down,” then Google’s limitations merely perpetuate the fraud wrought on copyright owners by those who game the system under the DMCA”.

Google has attracted much criticism from the RIAA for its policies on tackling copyright infringement in recent months. The latest attack comes after Dotted Music reported in March that the Communications Vice President of the Recording Industry Association of America said that Google refuses to combat the priority its search results give to illegal sites.

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