The efforts of media companies to quash online piracy are a bit like someone trying to put out a forest fire with a wet noodle. The latest pathetic flail comes in the form of coercing Google into censoring its results for some search terms. A number of words will no longer be autocompleted or trigger an instant search, among them the interesting and perfectly legal “bittorrent.” It’s a new high for antipiracy theater, because you can of course still search for the terms by hitting enter, and get the same results as before, including direct links to torrent files hosted on well-known indexers. The move will accomplish two things, though: first, it will damage consumer trust of a company whose services are ostensibly objective, and second, it confirms for the hundredth time how quixotic and misguided the efforts of the MPAA et al. are in every action they take. The actual censorship (I use the word lightly) is a joke. A leakier sieve than this was never wrought. While “Bittorrent” is blocked, “torrent” is not, and while some popular cyber lockers are on the blacklist (Rapidshare, Megaupload), others aren’t (Drop.io, Hotfile). As far as preventing piracy, the policy is worthless — incompetent. I have no doubt that this list was put together by the media companies, because Google would have done a far better job of doing it. The team responsible for executing this probably lost more time to derisive laughter than long lunches. Read more: Techcrunch
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment