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Google’s “Negligent” Piracy Response Prevented Critic Deindexing Its Own Site
- In Italy, several reports have alleged that football league Serie A had accused Google of ignoring its takedown notices and being unwilling to collaborate on anti-piracy measures. However, the reports lacked context in the bigger picture. Google has continuously been processing takedown notices, despite different accounts being used by Serie A. Even though Google only removed 27.9% of the URLs requested, their reasons for refusal can be to protect innocent parties from abusive takedown demands.
- From August 8th, 2023, Italy's Law n. 93, requires ISPs to block or prevent access to infringing content within 30 minutes. Even if Google deindexes the domains in Serie A's notices, that would not prevent access to any IPTV streams being offered. Google could potentially face a lot of false positives and run the risk of blocking legal access to websites and potentially receiving fines.
- In the UK and the Netherlands, Google has been deindexing entire pirate sites since 2021. The difference is that rightsholders in both countries previously obtained court orders that provide a legal basis for ISP blocking.
- Criticism has risen via Italian media during October, with headlines suggesting that Serie A had issued a search engine with takedown orders, but was ignored. Complaining about piracy is a regular fashion for football leagues in Spain and Italy but the recent accusations suggest that there are still issues with piracy that need to be addressed.
- In September 2024, Google received its 10 billionth URL removal request. On average, Google processes requests within six hours, but there is always a risk of human error. Based on the number of takedown requests lodged against Google accounts from Serie A, 70.2% of all URLs requested for removal do not exist in its search indexes and so can't be deleted. Even when takedown request accounts are switched, Google is still able to process the notices and remove those URLs that exist in its index.
- It still remains unclear whether any direct discussions take place between Google and rightsholders in private. On the surface, one-sided attacks on Google's response to piracy suggest there are difficulties in coordinating anti-piracy efforts.
- Although rightsholders have always criticized Google's response to their takedown notices, the recent accusations around Google’s 'grossly negligent' approach to piracy is unfounded. Overall, Google continues to uphold its policies against takedown notices and its preventative measures to avoid abusive, failed or simply careless takedown demands.
- The speed in which ISPs and service providers like Google have to take down infringing content under Italian law put a lot of pressure on them and there is a high risk of legal abuse of these takedown demands. Until Italy's Piracy Shield platform puts more guidelines in place about handling domain-only takedown notices, there should not be a gross misinterpretation of how Google deals with these types of requests.
- The accusations against Google to collaborate in anti-piracy efforts are still ongoing. However, their efforts to protect innocent parties from any harm and uphold the integrity of their takedown policies continues.
- Interestingly, even with the accusations that have arisen from these football leagues, Google still managed to prevent Serie A from deindexing its own website on October 27th, 2024, showing that their anti-piracy policies are still followed despite criticism.
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