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Over the past few years the entertainment industries have repeatedly asked Google to step up its game when it comes to its anti-piracy efforts.

These calls haven’t fallen on deaf ears and Google has slowly implemented various new anti-piracy measures in response.

Today, Google released an updated version of its “How Google Fights Piracy” report. The company provides an overview of all the efforts it makes to combat piracy while countering some of the entertainment industry complaints.

One of the steps Google has taken in recent years aims to downrank the most egregious “pirate” sites.

To accomplish this, Google made changes to its core algorithms which punish clear offenders. Using the number of accurate DMCA requests as an indicator, these sites are now demoted in search results for certain key phrases.

Despite continuing critique from rightsholders, Google notes that this change has been very effective.

“This process has proven extremely effective. Immediately upon launching improvements to our demotion signal in 2014, one major torrent site acknowledged traffic from search engines had dropped by 50% within the first week,” Google writes, citing one of our articles.

More recently, Google’s own findings confirmed this trend. As a result of the demotion policy, pirate sites lose the vast majority of their Google Search traffic.

“In May 2016, we found that demoted sites lost an average of 89% of their traffic from Google Search. These successes spur us to continue improving and refining the DMCA demotion signal.”

Despite this success, entertainment industry groups have recently called for a more rigorous response. Ideally, they would like Google to remove the results from pirate sites entirely, and make sure that infringing links don’t reappear under a different URL.

However, Google doesn’t want to go this far. The company warns that removing entire sites is dangerous as it may lead to censorship of content that’s perfectly legal.

“Whole-site removal is ineffective and can easily result in the censorship of lawful material,” Google writes.

“Blogging sites, for example, contain millions of pages from hundreds of thousands of users, as do social networking sites, e-commerce sites, and cloud computing services. All can inadvertently contain material that is infringing.”

Similarly, Google doesn’t believe in a “takedown and staydown” approach, where the company would proactively filter search results for pirated content. This would be unfeasible and unnecessary, the company states.

“One problem is that there is no way to know whether something identified as infringing in one place and at one time is also unlawful when it appears at a different place and at a different time,” Google notes.

Instead, the company says that copyright holders should use the existing takedown procedure, and target new sites when they appear so these can be downranked as well.

Finally, Google stresses that search is not a major driver of traffic to pirate sites to begin with. Only a small fraction of users reach these sites through search engines.

While the company is willing to help alleviate the problem, search engines are not the only way to eradicate piracy.

“Search engines do not control what content is on the Web. There are more than 60 trillion web addresses on the internet, and there will always be new sites dedicated to making copyrighted works available as long as there is money to be made doing so.”

Instead of focusing on search, copyright holders should take a “follow the money” approach and make sure that pirate sites are cut off from their revenue sources, Google argues.

In addition, they shouldn’t forget to offer consumers plenty of legal alternatives to piracy.

Convincing the entertainment industries of its good intentions is easier said than done though. “This report looks a lot like “greenwash”,” says Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of the music industry group BPI.

“Although we welcome the measures Google has taken so far, it is still one of the key enablers of piracy on the planet. Google has the resources and the tech expertise to do much more to get rid of the illegal content on its services,” he adds.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

ZTE’s Axon 7 smartphone has the kind of specs you’d expect from a $600 smartphone, but it has a much lower price. First announced in May, the ZTE Axon 7 is available for pre-order today for $400.

I won’t go so far as to say that it’s a top-tier phone with a mid-range price. But that certainly seems like a very good price for a phone with a Snapdragon 820 processor, at least 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, and a a 2560 x 1440 pixel display.

Continue reading ZTE Axon 7 up for pre-order for $400 at Liliputing.

(credit: Flickr: Rego Korosi )

The back-and-forth war between YouTube and the music industry continues, this time with a new privacy report from Google. In the company's "How Google Fights Privacy" report released today, the company details data showing that YouTube has paid $2 billion (£1.5 billion) to copyright holders through its Content ID system. That's double the payout it announced in 2014, which covered the payments received by the music industry since Content ID was introduced back in 2007.

Content ID is YouTube's way of scanning user-created content for copyright infringement, and it also has the music industry up in arms. When a creator uploads content to YouTube, the Content ID system detects if there's any trace of copyrighted material in the user-generated content, such as music. The copyright holders have the power to use Content ID to either report, block, or monetize videos that are identified as containing copyrighted content. In Google's report, YouTube claims that 90 percent of the more than 8,000 rightsholders choose to monetize that content, and 50 percent of the music industry's revenue from YouTube comes from this monetization.

While Google and YouTube have consistently reported how much they pay copyright holders, the music industry claims that the $2 billion it has received is not enough and that the Content ID process is inefficient. It's true that Content ID hasn't been completely accurate in the past; it erroneously flagged content that has been protected under fair use, such as Let's Play videos that include gaming content owned by gaming companies. Some reports also note that Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) estimated that Content ID "fails to identify upwards of 40 percent of the use of UMPG’s compositions on YouTube."

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Microsoft has updated its Skype client for Linux for the first time since 2014.

The new Skype for Linux Alpha featured an updated user interface and an entirely new architecture — it doesn’t yet have all the features available for Windows, Mac, iOS, or Android. But it uses the same calling architecture as Skype for those platforms, and the new version of Skype for Linux uses the same WebRTC protocol for voice and video calling as Skype for Web.

Continue reading Microsoft updates Skype for Linux, brings Skype calling to Chromebooks at Liliputing.

A new Skype for Linux client is now available as an alpha.

The Skype client for Linux had been long abandoned—it's stuck on version 4.3, compared to version 7 on Windows—but Microsoft has now belatedly recognized that Skype is at its most desirable when it's available on every platform. To that end, it has created an all-new Skype client.

The new client in fact has two versions. There's a Linux app for users of traditional Linux systems. There's also the Skype Web Client, which is supported in Chrome on Linux and Chromebooks running Chrome OS. Whether using the Web or the standalone app, the core code and capabilities are the same: it's using Chrome's WebRTC support to provide a plugin-free, Web-based Skype client.

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Niccolò Caranti is fading away from lack of proper attribution being given to his photos. (credit: Terrasque CC BY-SA 3.0)

A CC-licensed photo that was incorrectly used in an Italian festival's promotional materials has led to a public apology by the organisers for not respecting the terms of the licence, and the reimbursement of legal costs incurred.

The picture in question was taken by Niccolò Caranti, who is a professional photographer and an active member of the Wikipedia community—nearly 900 of his images are available on Wikimedia Commons. The photo was used by the Festival delle Resistenze 2016, held in Trentino-Alto Adige, in northern Italy.

Journalist Federico Rampini was one of the guest speakers at the festival, and the image used for all the promotional material was a photo of him taken by Caranti, which had been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence. This particular variant allows the image to be used freely for any purpose on the condition that it includes attribution and releases it under the same or a similar licence. However, neither condition was respected in the festival's publicity materials.

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