![\"Copyright\"](\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/copyright.gif\" "\\"Copyright\\"")
<\/p>\nHello all! You might have noticed I didn’t really bother posting anything for April Fools. The problem with April Fools articles is that if you make it too obvious, then it’s just silly, but if you make it too believable, then you open yourself up to a defamation lawsuit (especially if your site’s main points of discussions involves the litigation happy peoples of the MPAA, the RIAA and other\u00a0anti-piracy groups). Plus, the real news that I post these days are absurd enough already,\u00a0and when it comes to our overly biased copyright law, we are all\u00a0being made a fool all of the time.<\/p>\n
Oh right, the real news, which wasn’t very forthcoming this week …<\/p>\n
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![\"Google](\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/google_dmca_stats_201212.png\")
<\/a>More DMCA takedowns does not equal less pirated downloads<\/p><\/div>\n
Two copyright stories, but very much related. With rights groups submission millions upon millions of\u00a0links for piracy takedown, it was only a matter of time before they\u00a0realised how futile it all is. The BPI, Britain’s RIAA, was this week’s chosen candidate to speak out against the current copyright regime, saying the whack-a-mole\u00a0must be modified in their favour<\/a>.<\/p>\n What they want is “take down, stay down”, something I’ve covered before here\u00a0and with increasing frequency recently I might add. So instead of rights holder identifying the link that needs to be taken down, they only want to identify the piece of content that they want removed, and then it’s up to Google or whomever to do the actual search and destroy. So\u00a0the whack-a-mole\u00a0becomes one where the player simply points at the mole and says “mole bad, destroy mole”, and then Google becomes the one\u00a0that then plays the endless game of whack-a-mole. So no surprise that Google doesn’t want to do it.<\/p>\n Google also rightly point out that despite all the brouhaha over search engines, only 16% of traffic to piracy sites actually come from major search engines. The rest comes from people typing the piracy site’s URL into their browsers, bypassing search engines completely. Don’t be fooled, rights holders are fully aware that Google has never been the main problem.\u00a0The focus on Google is really just the thin end of the wedge, because Google is a well known company and a very visible target. Once they can get Google to do their bidding, they may very well turn their sights to ISPs and even browser makers, to force them too to play the game of copyright whack-a-mole.<\/p>\n