Torrentfreak: “Huh? Google Crowns a New Pirate Bay” plus 1 more

Posted: 11 Jan 2015 02:07 AM PST

Ever since The Pirate Bay was raided early December millions of people have been anticipating a comeback. In the meantime, they have had had no other option than to look for alternatives.

Several websites inspired by The Pirate Bay quickly appeared online, hoping to fill this gap. These include the OldPirateBay site that was launched by the operators of Isohunt.to.

While the site’s operators have nothing to do with The Pirate Bay, they cleverly use the brand to gain traffic. It’s been a successful strategy with the site now pulling in millions of visitors per day.

Interestingly, many of these visitors are being referred by Google where the OldPirateBay site has gained the top search spot . This is odd, to say the least, because the official Pirate Bay domain is still up and running.

For some reason Google’s algorithms have decided that the “copy,” which also indexes torrents from other torrent sites, is of more interest than the official site, which appears several results down.

While we have to agree that most torrent users will find OldPirateBay more useful, it doesn’t feel entirely right that Google can just crown a new Pirate Bay. In this instance, we prefer Bing’s strategy.

Those who use Microsoft’s search engine will still see thepiratebay.se listed as the top result. And to avoid any confusion, Bing clearly labels it as the “official site,” which it still is.

It appears that thepiratebay.se can only regain the top spot in Google if they start serving torrents again. Whether that will happen should become clear during the coming days when The Pirate Bay crew is expected to make an official statement.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.

Chilling Effects DMCA Archive Censors Itself

Posted: 10 Jan 2015 09:12 AM PST

On an average day Google now processes more than a million takedown requests from copyright holders, and that’s for its search engine alone.

Thanks to Google’s transparency report the public is able to see where these notices come from and what content they’re targeting. In addition, Google partners with Chilling Effects to post redacted copies of all notices online.

The Chilling Effects DMCA clearing house is one of the few tools that helps to keep copyright holders accountable. Founded by Harvard’s Berkman Center, it offers an invaluable database for researchers and the public in general.

At TF we use the website on a weekly basis to spot inaccurate takedown notices and other wrongdoings. Since the native search engine doesn’t always return the best results, we mostly use Google to spot newsworthy notices on the site.

This week, however, we were no longer able to do so. The Chilling Effects team decided to remove its entire domain from all search engines, including its homepage and other informational and educational resources.

Ironically enough, complaints from copyright holders are at the base of this unprecedented display of self-censorship. Since Chilling Effects has partnered with Google to publish all takedown notices Google receives, its pages contain hundreds of millions of non-linked URLs to infringing material. Copyright holders are not happy with these pages. Previously, Copyright Alliance CEO Sandra Aistars described the activities of the Chilling Effects projects as “repugnant.”

As a result of the increased criticisms Chilling Effects has now decided to hide its content from search engines, making it harder to find.

“After much internal discussion the Chilling Effects project recently made the decision to remove the site’s notice pages from search engines,” Berkman Center project coordinator Adam Holland informs TF.

“Our recent relaunch of the site has brought it a lot more attention, and as a result, we’re currently thinking through ways to better balance making this information available for valuable study, research, and journalism, while still addressing the concerns of people whose information appears in the database.”

The self censorship may sound strange coming from an organization that was founded to offer more transparency, but the Chilling Effects team believes that it strikes the right balance, for now.

“As a project, we’ve always worked to strike that balance, for example by removing personally identifying information. Removing notice pages from search engine results is the latest step in that balancing process,” Holland tells us.

“It may or may not prove to be permanent, but for now it’s the step that makes the most sense as we continue to think things through,” he adds.

While we respect the decision it’s a real shame for researchers that the notices and other informational material are now hidden from search engines. The notices themselves remain online, but with just the site’s own search it’s harder to find cases of abuse.

The copyright holders on the other hand will be happy. But they probably don’t care much about the chilling effect it has.

^{Photo: CC}

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.