This is wrong. Google should aim to provide the best possible result for the search. If that is an copyrighted videostream on a non-authorized site (e.g. a stream of all of the episodes of the series i'm googling for), this should be exactly the first result. And not a lame but authorized preview of 30 seconds.
Already found myself using duckduckgo in such cases, imagining the results were better.
I think your proposed policy is very short-sighted.
More than ever, thanks to the Internet and ideas like social networking and search engines, independent artists of whatever genre can compete directly with the industry behemoths on merit. These are exactly the kind of people copyright is supposed to help. This is the very essence of promoting the creation and distribution of new works!
If massive industry players like Google are permitted to turn a blind eye to the side effects of their vast resources and almost monopolistic influence, while at the same time making staggering amounts of money helping many people to infringe copyright, then all this does is squash the little guys. It gives all the power back to the industry giants who are big enough to throw their weight around anyway. You know, the ones who have been price gouging for decades and pushing DRM and hiring whole departments to issue takedown notices to anything that vaguely resembles a title of a song they once sold and funding organisations that threaten to sue just about anyone in one of the most flagrant violations of any justice system in recent memory?
Frankly, I think Google have been incredibly lucky that the arm's length/safe harbour philosophy has held up so strongly so far in the global legal landscape. Given that the very thing that makes them so potentially damaging to legal rightsholders is their scale, and they make vast sums of money because of that scale, it would not have been unreasonable to go down a different path and impose more of a burden on them in terms of preventing abuse of their systems to break the law.
If they voluntarily take reasonable steps in that direction anyway, it sends the right message about corporate social responsibility. That alone is worth orders of magnitude more to them than the eyeballs of seventeen people who are going to go use Duck Duck Go for their searches instead. But it also supports the people who actually created the works you apparently enjoy enough to search for them but not enough to pay for them, which is ultimately good for everyone except freeloaders, since it promotes creation of more work, which more people can then search for on Google, and more people can then enjoy.
You're assuming that legitimate sites that help independent artists won't receive many copyright takedown requests. It's difficult for sites to control what their users upload and they typically rely on the DMCA. If this system is abused, new legitimate sites that respect DMCA can still be buried.
This does level the playing field for Youtube. They've been facing issues with videos that have been filtered for content falling under fair use and over-aggressive labels making mistaken takedowns. A new user-contributed video startup will now have to develop the same filtering and protections, or they risk being buried by Google through this system.
You are assuming that having takedown notices does not correlate with a lack of quality. I don't have any inside information about this change in particular, but I'd guess that is a bad assumption. I'd bet that indeed, this signal is useful to predict search quality on some set of traffic, and that's why Google is using it.
There tends to be a high bar to meet to push out search quality changes at Google.
Even in the announcement, it's about "legitimate, quality sources". Legitimate comes first, it is there combined with quality, but in reality it isn't. The best videohosters out there aren't legitimate in the eyes of the copyright-holders.
How high quality is the linked and praised npr.org, which incorporates Youtube-Videos which arent playable "from some websites", including npr.org [1] (from my ip at least)?
I don't have the data. I can't have. But according to the argumentation of the announcement itself and my own judgement regarding the sites in question, this is not a "search quality change" with a high bar to meet, done by engineers wanting to improve the results. I bet this comes from lawyers, (internal?) politics or pressure from the copyright-industry.
that list does correlate rather well with spammy content (stuffed links and lots of flash ads and popups), it just also happens to correlate well with sites you're looking for when you want a torrent. As long as they're still indexing these sites, they're probably still going to come up if you add "torrent" to your query, so I don't really see the problem.
The reality is, when most people are looking for a video, they are looking to find it on an official site, and not a streaming video site from china or a torrent site with 18 "download" buttons, none of which links to the actual torrent file download (it's in the plain text link). As long as they can still find the other content, you're still meeting everyone's needs and you've probably upped average searcher satisfaction.
Now, geographic restrictions on video playback would be a great search signal to incorporate (would googlebot start trying to play videostreams, though?). That shit is really annoying.
The torrent sites and file sharing sites are aplenty in there. Are you saying they are low quality? It kinda seems obvious that the site that has the best torrents/files will have the highest quality and hence receive the most takedown notices.
Does this mean Google will never surface YouTube in its search results? That is probably the largest and most known source of copyright infringing material
YouTube follows the DMCA (and does ContentID or whatever). Google search probably doesn't get very many requests to remove links to YouTube.
This policy shouldn't have much impact at all on any large site that discourages copyright violations and responds promptly to DMCA takedowns, because it isn't worth bothering Google Search about that content.
I agree this is probably what's happening but I'm worried this might change in the future. Right now I think all that happens is that the link is removed from the search results but if the site itself is also penalized, I'm afraid content owners can now see the value of sending both a DMCA and copyright takedown notice simultaneously.
Haha, Youtube seems exempt from most filters - I get completely unrelated videos in the top 2-3 spots all the time. Come to think of it, that's pretty sad...
Already found myself using duckduckgo in such cases, imagining the results were better.