Are Companies Abusing Google’s “Pirate Update”?

, ,

While people have been fretting about Google penalizing innocent site holders, it appears outside groups have been abusing Google’s DMCA algorithm to try to get legal content about films taken offline.

For those who aren’t familiar with the DMCA related algorithm, known commonly as Google’s Pirate Update, it basically referenced valid DMCA takedown requests as part of a sites rankings. If a site has been frequently hit with valid takedown requests, its ranking is penalized.

However, TorrentFreak has uncovered that a company who has been issuing DMCA requests on behalf of multiple movie companies has been issuing requests for the removal of legal content such as listings for legal copies of the movie on Amazon and iTunes, as well as Wikipedia pages about several movies and television shows.

Most of these requests were ignored by Google, but it is a worrisome matter that these companies are clearly using DMCA requests without discretion, and these invalid  requests could plausibly be missed by algorithms sorting out the mess.

Search Engine Land posits that the motivation of the mysterious organization, known as “Yes It Is – No Piracy” could be to bump up their own pages of content for specific listings while lowering legitimate sites, but for now, the motive is unclear.

0 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply