Weak Links and The War Against Piracy
Only a few weeks ago, Google announced its plan to punish sites that are linked to piracy by rating them lower on searches. This means they won’t appear as top searches anymore or will have a lower rating. So what does this mean for the user and the industries that want to eliminate piracy?
Google’s decision to punish websites involved with piracy claims, such as torrent websites, comes after pushes from the music and movie industries to take action against piracy. Motivated by a steady decline in sales, these industries have encouraged Google to take a more aggressive stance against piracy for a long time. Sites such as The Pirate Bay, FilesTube and even YouTube could be negatively affected by the new system that assigns “valid copyright removal notices” to websites and ranks them lower depending on the amount of notices they have.
From a networks point of view, edges between websites are being weakened depending on such notices, which means that a group of websites will become slightly segregated from the massive search network that is Google. This would in essence look like the karate club example, where a group of nodes (composed of sites linked to piracy) will greatly differ until they are ultimately “expelled”. This will make illegal content harder to find, but as stated in the BBC article, the “Devil is in the details”. A site like The Pirate Bay is not only meant for illegal content. Content is based on user upload so there can be as much legal file sharing as there is illegal file sharing. If legal files get affected by Google’s new system, then it will discourage users from the website, potentially forcing the website to close.
Google has to act accordingly, finding a balance between weakening the edges of piracy sites and appeasing the corporations that motivated these actions. It is a difficult task, but Google’s history and resources could very well find the ideal solution to this problem.
Sources:
Article:
Google to push pirate sites down search results:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/19229349
Google Starts Punishing “Pirate” Sites in Search Results
http://torrentfreak.com/google-starts-punishing-pirate-sites-in-search-results-120810/