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BPI welcomes Weatherley’s report on search engines and piracy
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 30 May 2014
Record label trade body the BPI has welcomed the previously promised report from Mike Weatherley MP, IP Advisor to David Cameron, about the role of search engines in policing piracy online.
As much previously reported, Google has been at the top of the music industry’s piracy gripe list for a while now, with rights owners reckoning that the search engine should do more to downgrade and preferably remove links to unlicensed content sources from artist-based search results.
The web giant will remove specific copyright infringing URLs when labels provide them, but doesn’t proactively look for illegitimate content itself, and won’t instigate site-wide takedowns, even where a court has issued web-blocking injunctions against a site to the internet service providers.
When asked about Google’s role in the ongoing battle against piracy in an interview with CMU earlier this year, Weatherley said: “I am not comfortable about asking Google to be the policemen – it is not them who are distributing the illegal content – but they do have a role to play in directing people to legal sites and should be part of the informing and educating agenda. As always, I would prefer government not to introduce measures by force; that should only be a last resort option”.
And with that in mind, Weatherley’s new paper makes few calls for new legislation, but rather calls on search engines, and Google in particular, to voluntarily become more proactive in this domain, and for ministers to encourage such action from the web giant.
Amongst the recommendations for Google are that it get better at ‘crawling’ and prioritising legitimate sites; that it consider marking (Twitter verified style) confirmed legitimate music sites in its search results; that it tap into industry-endorsed black lists (such as that operated by the City Of London Police) and recognise web-blocking court orders to inform the downgrading or removal of infringing sites; and that it get involved in the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme, or VCAP, that the rights owners are currently negotiating with the internet service providers.
Welcoming the report, BPI boss Geoff Taylor told CMU: “Mike Weatherley’s report is a thorough and carefully considered contribution to the policy debate on the need for action to reduce the prominence of illegal websites in search results. We agree with his recommendations and invite search engines to work with us without delay to bring them into effect.
“Other online intermediaries such as advertisers and payment providers have taken voluntary action to counter the growth of the online black market. Google, which dominates UK search, has paid lip service to the issue but in practice has done little to address the ethical loophole in its algorithm, which directs millions of consumers to sites it clearly knows to be illegal”.
“If search engines will not now work with the creative sector to give effect to these recommendations, government should legislate to boost growth in the digital economy and to give consumers confidence they can search for entertainment safely and legally online”.
You can read Weatherley’s full paper here, and his ten recommendations here.
