"How Google is Fighting Piracy"

After a streak of complaints of facilitating online piracy, Google released its latest update of the “How Google Fights Piracy” report on July 13th, 2016. The report covers the various ways Google is battling piracy on its multiple channels. As one of the world’s largest search engines, Google sets precedents and influences trends for online content safety and copyright protection. Google has long advocated that the best way to battle online piracy is to provide better legitimate alternatives for consumers and to end advertisement revenue for sites providing pirated material (See the 2013 and 2014 reports). To uphold these ideals, Google’s search ranking algorithm accounts for the number of valid copyright infringement claims made on a website (and ranks them inversely) and GoogleAds are removed from pirating websites in an attempt to cut off revenue streams.

Google takes online piracy and transparency seriously. Google-owned YouTube has been at the forefront of takedown (and staydown, and more) technology since introducing its Content ID database just a few years ago. Over 8,000 rightsholders use Content ID, which means YouTube has over 50 million active reference files and over 600 years of audio and visual reference content to cross check against each video. With 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, those numbers far exceed human capabilities. Rightsholders are given the opportunity to decide the reaction to videos infringing on their content: videos can either be left up and tracked, taken down, or the rightsholder can make profits off of the video advertisements consumers see. The Content ID system has generated over $2 billion for partners since it first launched and Google claims it allows “creators to use copyrighted content to both celebrate their favorite music and unlock an additional source of revenue.” In their report, Google defends Content ID by declaring, “each time a music fan chooses YouTube over an unauthorized source for music, that’s a victory against piracy.” Although, many artists are claiming that using Content ID just for YouTube is not enough and that Google should be responsible for pre-screening all links before ranking them in searches.

With over 94% of the Lumen Database comprised of takedown notices to Google, Lumen is especially interested in the company’s methodology. Although Lumen receives no notices from the YouTube Content ID process, we do receive takedown notices from Google’s Search. As covered by the report, Google recently instituted a Trusted Copyright Removal Program for Search. The program allows trusted copyright owners and enforcement agents to submit large volumes of webpages on a consistent basis (streamlining the takedown notice submission process). Since 2012, more than seventy-thousand different organizations have submitted requests to Google to remove webpages from search results based on copyright violations, of those seventy-thousand, 114 are TCRP partners. Thus, the vast majority of notices every year are coming from a small percentage of submitters. Only a few parties are sending hundreds of thousands of (in one case, over a million) takedown notices to Google, a trend noticeable on the Lumen database as well as in Google's transparency report.

Looking at these trends in parallel, and at Google's latest Report, and as online content continues to grow in both size and quantity, the online ecosystem is still not close to an answer as to whose responsibility is it to curate content and check for piracy. Is it possible to create a Content ID system for non-video online mediums?

In this context, I personally think it is especially important to consider power distribution for rightsholders, comparing those granted TCRP status and able to streamline takedown notices to those who must file notices manually. Should money, fame, or prestige play a role in our access to pre-approved takedowns?