MPAA: 82 Percent Of Searches Leading To Pirated Content Come From Google

 The flick Association of America (MPAA) these days suspect Google and alternative search engines of enjoying “a important role” in directive customers to pirated movies and television shows, with a special callout for the quantity of Google searches that result in infringing material.

It’s the newest volley during a long-running battle between Hollywood and also the search engines over the straightforward on-line availableness of taken content and whose job it\'s to wash up the matter.

MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd — the previous United States legislator — introduced the results of a brand new study throughout a press conference these days in Washington, DC. within the MPAA’s news unleash (PDF), Dodd says search engines share responsibility for stopping the thieving of proprietary material.

    Search engines bear responsibility for introducing individuals to infringing content — even those who aren’t actively craving for it. the tv and moving-picture show community is functioning each day to develop new and innovative ways that to observe content on-line, and because the Internet’s gatekeepers, search engines share a responsibility to play a constructive role in not directive audiences to illegitimate content.

The MPAA’s study found that seventy four p.c of customers aforesaid that they had used an exploration engine the primary time that they visited a web site with copyright-infringing content, and fifty eight p.c of these searches contained general keywords just like the names of TV shows or searches to observe one thing on-line, not keywords that specifically spoken finding infringing content.
Google’s Role In egress Pirated Content

The MPAA referred to as out Google for its role in leading customers to infringing material. in keeping with the survey, eighty two p.c of all searches that LED to web content with ill-gotten content came from Google. (The study says sixteen p.c found the content via Bing/Yahoo and 2 p.c via alternative search engines.)

Further, the MPAA says that Google’s Pirate Update last August did nothing to hurt sites with ill-gotten content.

    The study additionally found no proof that the amendment Google created to its formula last year to require into consideration the quantity of copyright takedown notices a web site has received had a bearing on search-referred traffic to infringing sites. The share of referral traffic from Google to infringing sites enclosed within the Google Transparency Report remained flat within the 3 months following Google’s implementation of the amendment last August.

The MPAA study (PDF transfer here) was done by contend.com and uses each United States and GB client information in its findings. contend says it checked out the highest a pair of,000 websites listed in Google’s transparency reports hierarchical  by variety of removal requests. This chart shows traffic to infringing sites within the 3 months before and once the Pirate Update in August 2012.

There are, of course, flaws in the study (as there are in many studies). For example, not all websites/URLs listed in Google’s transparency report actually host infringing content. (Google evaluates all removal requests and acts on the legitimate ones, but this is basically an eternal game of whack-a-mole because infringing content that’s removed from one site very often shows up on a new site very quickly.)

Google announced late last year that it had removed 50 million web pages from its index in response to the same piracy reports that the MPAA study mentions as part of Google’s transparency reporting. In July, Google’s Eric Schmidt said Hollywood should take pirates to court to prevent privacy, rather than focus on getting search engines to remove websites after the piracy takes place.