The largest pirate database ever.



Google is building the world’s largest DB of links to pirated content by indexing all copyright takedown requests online.
'Just' 719,415 URLs are in there, and its publicly available...

The giant database is a result from indexing all applications received for blocking links that lead to pirated content, from displaying Google Search results pages.

And this thing is growing rapidly: the latest batch of complaints contained 719,415 URLs to be removed from the search engine index, an amount (amassed over a single week) which doubled the number of requests received two months ago.



NOW, there's a "little" issue with this:

The "Chilling Effects" project -which was created to protect lawful online activities from legal threats- hosts the DB with takedown notices, and Google is one of the most prominent providers of DMCA complaints for the archive.

For the copyright holders the purpose of these takedown requests is to make pirated content unavailable through Google’s search engine. This happens through automatic takedown tools, with the unfortunate consequence that legitimate movie trailers and IMDB or Last.fm pages are censored too.

But, there is another issue that casts doubt over the effectiveness of the process.

Because Google indexes all takedown requests with the “infringing” URLs on the ChillingEffects website, the search engine is effectively building the world’s largest database of links to pirated content.

Around the same time next year, Google will have built a database of dozens of millions of pirated links, and a few years later it will be a billion links. Not just links to BitTorrent sites, but also files hosted on cyberlockers, blogs and a wide range of other websites all collected in one place.

Of course, Google’s search engine already indexes pretty much the entire Internet, but a database dedicated to infringing content opens up the possibility for outsiders to mine this data for pirate search engines. And that’s just one of the problems with Google’s transparency.

Disabling access to these “pirate” lists is harder than it seems.

Since all the takedown requests are published online, the URLs in question can still be found through Google. This irony leads to the absurd situation where copyright holders (intentionally or automatically) ask Google to take down their own takedown requests.

Yep, Microsoft and many companies have already submitted that request. In other words, Google is being asked to remove links to takedown requests, because these link to sites that link to copyrighted material. And even that is not enough...

Because the new takedown notice creates a link to the old notice, copyright holders have to send another request to take the new one down, followed by another… and another. A comical display of meta-censorship which could go on endlessly.
So, that's right, the same copyright holders are assisting in the creation of the world’s largest database of links to pirated content, courtesy of Google.

Pretty funny, right?

NEWS SOURCE #1: Google Build's largest database of links to pirated media (via) TorrentFreak
NEWS SOURCE #2: Transparency Report (via) Google

Our thanks to 'Gauss' for this news item!