news Google moves to block movie piracy loophole

[Salieri]

 

Google Australia has agreed to banish hundreds more websites involved in the illegal downloading of movies and programs after pirates were able to bypass its initial attempts to remove them from search results.

The tech giant agreed to voluntarily pull down websites engaging in piracy last year to help stop the spread of illegally downloaded material, a move which allowed copyright holders to avoid fighting the tech giant for an injunction in court. However, content pirates were able to reappear on Google by slightly tweaking the domain address and creating "proxy" or "mirror" sites - variations of the previously blocked addresses.

Graham Burke, former chief executive of Village Roadshow.CREDIT:EDDIE JIM

 

Village Roadshow non-executive director and Creative Content Australia chairman Graham Burke said that Google will now close that loophole by shutting down these mirror sites as soon as they pop up.

"Site blocking was brought in by the government and was effective but there was massive leakage because while the government and site blocking shut the front door, the back door was still wide open and search engines were taking people to proxy and mirror sites," Mr Burke said.

 

"The pirates are taking advantage of the lag time between their criminal mirror site going up by changing one letter and us taking three or four weeks to go back through the court system."

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Mr Burke said last year that there had been 832 sites blocked by Google as part of the new collaborative approach, but he said hundreds more would now be "de-indexed" under the new arrangement.

Once notified by the rights holder that a new domain is a new location for a domain - ie a mirror or redirect - that was previously subjected to a site-blocking order, Google will now immediately "de-index" it from the Australian country version without the need for a court injunction.

"Piracy has been made one whole lot harder because of site blocking, but there’s a loophole which is the mirror or proxy sites that they have developed," he said. "This is shutting down that loophole and it’s massive.”

Mr Burke has previously accused the US tech giant of "facilitating crime" by allowing the websites to be found in search and told Google to "sue" him over the comments.

There have been laws in place since 2015 allowing copyright holders to obtain a court order to force internet provides to block pirate websites, but Mr Burke has separately been advocating for changes to the way the tech company handles illegally shared content since 2014.

The measures were tightened up to restrict the bypassing of the blocks and to enable copyright holders to get an injunction against a search engine in 2018, before Google agreed to 'de-index' the sites altogether.

"We’ve been working in collaboration with Creative Content Australia, the Australia New Zealand Screen Association, and the Federal Government to support more effective measures against pirate sites sharing Australian film content on the Web," Lucinda Longcroft, director of public policy at Google Australia said. "We are hopeful these measures will be a welcome step towards protecting copyright and will provide a faster solution for rightsholders."

Village Roadshow, which Mr Burke led for more than 30 years until his retirement last year, lost millions of dollars due to piracy of hit films like Lion and Mad Max: Fury Road.

source: 

Australian Breaking News Headlines & World News Online | SMH.com.au

WWW.SMH.COM.AU

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[deepdigger]

Who cares about file sharing sites. They have too many ads, lock files as premium only on filehosts, you have to buy filehost account to download. They are all about the money. So it is fair to be attacked for copyrights infringement.