Link-Busters Sent a Billion DMCA Takedown Requests to Google Search.

ModerateImprovement@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.world – 152 points –
torrentfreak.com
16

Is this even an effective approach? The pirates I know don't use Google to find content anyway.

Those takedown services are mostly trash. At my last job we got, well, not a billion of them, but a substantial number and so many were dead URLs, sites that don't exist anymore, wrongly identified content, IPFS gateways and so on.

A shocking few were actually content that they claimed it to be, and I can't imagine whatever this company is doing with google results is somehow more useful in preventing piracy.

Sounds like a classic cash grab—which is kind of like piracy.

I disagree, unless you mean nautical piracy. The difference is that people are being swindled into paying them for a service that’s less effective than they represent it as being, whereas with piracy the only “loss” anyone suffers is speculative at best. What they’re doing is more like fraud, honestly. Unfortunately that speculative loss’s value is codified into law and the fraud is probably permitted as long as they have some fine print somewhere covering their asses.

The same stuff as botting on torrents, even when the content being torrented is legally available on the creators website (adultswim.com), and then sending cease and desist letters. We won't pay them bastards, so our strategy in court will be that it IS fully available, legally.

does google still do that thing with "some links on this result page were excluded based on this request", followed by a link to full text of the request, said link included? 😆

Truthfully, I do not know. I haven’t been using Google anymore because the result quality is so poor.

Agreed. What's your engine of choice these days?

udm14.com

The problem I have with that, as a non-gogle search engine user is I just know at some point when everyone has started using it, gogle will just simply delete it off the face of the earth and pretend it never existed in an effort to force their AI. Wouldn't be the first and certainly nowhere near the last time they killed something to benefit only them.

Yooo that's really cool! I knew about the web filter thing but this is just nice

I mean yeah I know most pirates won't use Google and will use other search engines but the majority of people using the internet don't even know that there are other search engines to use. Keeping them off Google is effective at preventing them from reaching other people.

No, not really. They just register a new domain.

I.e xyz.com buys xyz.net and the cycle never ends.

Whenever I want to pirate something I just go straight to btdig. And if there's no torrent and I really need to search the web, I've had much better luck with Yandex. I figure they're more resistant to takedowns from western corporations