Business News Digital Labels & Publishers Legal

As it issues 200 millionth takedown against Google, BPI calls for web giant to do more to keep piracy sites out of search

By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 29 March 2016

Hey Spotify founder Daniel Ek, bragging about your 30 million premium users, here’s a stat to put that into perspective. UK record industry trade group the BPI has now issued 200 million takedown requests against Google Search. And that’s only in the UK since July 2011. You’ve been going since 2008 and are in loads of countries, with Indonesia to follow this bloody week. And there was you thinking there was a business in putting content online. Taking content offline, that’s there the real opportunities lie.

Though the BPI, of course, would rather not be the world’s takedown king, issuing a flood of requests to Google demanding it remove links from its search engine to copyright infringing content. The web giant is obliged to respond to such requests in order to benefit from the safe harbours of European and US law that ensure it can’t be held liable for copyright infringement of the sites to which it links.

Google isn’t so keen on receiving all those requests either, but – the record industry would argue – it is responsible for the flood by refusing to operate a system whereby, once a link to a bit of infringing content has been removed once, alternative links that are attached to the same bit of content on the same site can’t then be added.

Or even better, Google would just delist any links that point to a site that has been declared by the courts as a rampant copyright infringer (especially if said courts have also issued a web-block injunction to internet service providers against the infringing site). Google, in the main, has always resisted such anti-piracy approaches.

With the 200 millionth takedown moment approaching, the BPI last week used the occasion to again call on Google to do more on this front, noting that the UK government has set up a roundtable to bring stakeholders together to consider the issue. The record industry group argues that the proliferation of links to piracy sites on Google – despite the 200 million takedown requests – hinders the development of legit digital music services.

The BPI revealed last week some of the proposals it will take to that roundtable session, including: “A lower threshold for the number of notices required to de-rank an illegal site and transparency over that threshold; improved discoverability of genuine sites to help consumers towards legal content; automatic de-listing of sites that have been ruled illegal by the High Court; action to prevent illegal sites avoiding demotion by swapping domain; and ‘notice and stay down’ – once a piece of content has been notified for removal, it should not be indexed again for the same site”. So, quite a wide-ranging list then.

Says BPI boss Geoff Taylor: “The BPI believes that people who make music or other entertainment deserve to be rewarded for their work and creativity. Only when consumers support legitimate sites can labels, studios and broadcasters consistently invest in the best talent to make high quality entertainment we can all enjoy”.

He goes on: “The notice and takedown system, as currently structured, cannot represent an effective response to piracy and requires urgent reform. Internet intermediaries like search engines clearly need to take more active responsibility to stop directing business to the black market”.

Taylor concludes by revealing he’s heard of search engines other than Google, stating that: “We are calling on Google and Bing to show their undiluted commitment to artists and the creative process by implementing a more pro-active solution to illegal sites appearing in search results. This will avoid the cost for both of us in dealing with hundreds of repeated notices for the same content on the same illegal sites”.