Google's View On the Whac-a-Mole of Blocking Pirate Sites 182
jones_supa writes "During a debate in London last night, the game of whac-a-mole related to blocking pirate sites was discussed by artists, labels, the BPI, and Google. Most interestingly, Google's Theo Bertram brought to the table the idea of going after the sites as a business, which in practice would mean strangling their (often voluminous) advertising budget. A test performed by musician David Lowery confirmed that a search for Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe' conjured up a list of unlicensed sites, some of which have an advertising relationship with Google. Geoff Taylor of the BPI said that Google has the both the information and technological ability to directly stomp infringing sites, but at the same time noted that somewhat oddly iTunes has not arranged itself a prominent position in the results to promote legally-purchased music, which can't be completely Google's fault."
iTunes? What's that? (Score:1, Informative)
"...Google has the both the information and technological ability to directly stomp infringing sites, but at the same time noted that somewhat oddly iTunes has not arranged itself a prominent position in the results to promote legally-purchased music...
So, I'm curious. Just exactly how many billions of downloads must the worlds largest legal music store obtain before managing to obtain a decent page rank?
Talk about a load-of-shit excuse, coming from the very company who is doing the indexing.
iTunes (Score:5, Informative)
The reason iTunes isn't up there is that the iTunes music shop isn't accessible through a web browser. You can see what is on there but all the links just try to make you download iTunes. Google indexes the web, not iTunes.