Quote:
Originally Posted by ebusinesstutor
I did a search for a book and of the top 3 results, two were pirated versions and some people may download them without knowing they aren't supposed to be free. If we make people go to pirate sites to download instead of finding them in the top Google results, I think that would be beneficial.
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I'm a stalwart defender of complete data freedom on the internet but I can't help but agree entirely with this statement. There's a difference between someone wanting to read news not approved of by his government and copyright infringement. Piracy isn't freedom of speech, period.
It's tricky though, not like it's google's fault that random people are committing piracy on public sites. They're not trying to help the pirates, they just want people to find what they search for, their software has no idea if something is legal/moral/ethical/etc or not. Thus, it's hardly fair to expect them to monitor the entire internet for whatever new types of piracy crop up. Even if they were to analyze every single bit that passes through their system they would still fail, since the pirates would just adapt.
Get's even worse if you consider crowd sourcing. Karma-like system work great on closed systems, but they're horrible for open ones (and one for google would have to be open). Just imagine how many homophobes would downvote helpful sites for those people into oblivion. Or how racists would make anything by colored people vanish from google in an instant.
Really not sure how it should, or could, be done.