Google Is Still the Copyright Lobby's Favorite Anti-Piracy Punching Bag

When you see millions of dollars slipping out of your grasp, it can make you want to punch someone. Anyone. Even if it's not actually the person responsible for your dwindling cash. In the case of Big Content, copyright interests remain convinced that online piracy is the culprit for lost profits, and Google is the punching bag of choice.

The content lobby’s been throwing extra-fierce punches the search giant’s way lately, and now the British government stepped up to join it for a swing.

Parliament presented a report today blaming Google for enabling would-be pirates. It called the company out for its "derisory" efforts, "notable" failure and “evident reluctance” to block search traffic to copyright-infringing websites.

John Whittingdale MP, chair of the House of Commons’ Culture Media and Sport Committee, said in a statement with the report:

We are also unimpressed by Google's continued failure to stop directing consumers to illegal, copyright infringing material on the flimsy excuse that some of the sites may also host some legal content.

The continuing promotion of illegal content through search engines is simply unacceptable, and efforts to stop it have so far been derisory. There is no reason why they cannot demote and ultimately remove sites hosting large amounts of illegal material from search engine results.

The Committee is absolutely right. Not in demanding that Google should be its brother in arms in the War on Piracy, but in pointing out that the web giant isn't doing much fighting at all.

Google’s been caught in the crosshairs of the copyright battle for years, with steadily increasing pressure from the industry side, which claims that as the gateway of internet traffic, the search company should just lock the gate when nefarious pirates come knocking.

In the States this week, the MPAA and RIAA railed against Google for not doing more to put up those locks. And while Google has acquiesced to the content industry's requests many times, it’s always with the cool and condescending response of a teenager who’ll do just enough of his homework to get his parents off his back.

Google continues to pass the buck, claiming search is only a small percentage of how people find illegal downloading sites. But even the smallest tweaks to its algorithms show a huge drop in traffic to piracy-enabling websites, TorrentFreak reported.

Case in point, on Tuesday TorrentFreak pointed out that Google had thrown a bone to the free-expression team and unbanned certain piracy-related words from its Instant and autocomplete features. After removing "BitTorrent" and "uTorrent" off the list of blacklisted keywords, search traffic to those torrenting sites shot up.

Copyright interests have responded. Earlier this week, Wired reported that what's essentially anti-piracy propaganda will now be taught in elementary schools in California. A group whose members include the MPAA, RIAA, Verizon, Comcast and AT&T drafted lesson plans targeted to children under 10 years old to drill home that copyright infringement is bad thing.

Across the pond, illicit downloading of movies and TV shows is now on par with child pornography. According to the Committee, "Google and others already work with international law enforcement to block for example child porn from search results and it has provided no coherent, responsible reason why it can't do the same for illegal, pirated content."

It can, it just probably isn't going to. The autocomplete renege is just the latest example in the long game of cat and mouse between the content lobby and the powerful search engine. But it will be interesting to see how much Google caves or stands it ground in the future, as the content industry and governments resort to greater and greater extremes to fight would-be internet pirates.