Despite copyright holders' hopes, this won't do much to help their situation because pirates rarely use search engines

Feb 20, 2017 11:00 GMT  ·  By

That deal between search engines and the British government is finally official after many years of meetings that always reached somewhat of a dead end. Google and Microsoft are just two of the companies that have agreed to do more to fight against piracy. 

Just recently, information showed that search engines agreed to roll out code that would do more to prevent people's access to torrent and streaming sites following a Digital Economy Bill Committee. It was revealed that even if the companies chose not to push such a code, they'd be forced to comply with the law, which indicates tech companies were not really given any real choice in this.

Minister for universities, science, research and innovation Jo Johnson believes that the relationship between search engines and the "leading creative industries" needs to be collaborative. "It is essential that consumers are presented with links to legitimate websites and services, not provided with links to pirate sites," he adds, cited by The Telegraph.

How things will change

So what's going to happen now? Well, websites that have been served copyright infringement notes will be demoted, so they won't appear on the first page for common searches. The search autocomplete function will also stop displaying terms that may lead to pirate websites.

Compliance with the new code will be monitored by the Intellectual Property Office over the next few months. "We have long campaigned for search engines to do more to ensure fans are directed to legal sources for music or other entertainment. There is much work still to do to achieve this. The Code will not be a silver bullet fix, but it will mean that illegal sites are demoted more quickly from search results and that fans searching for music are more likely to find a fair site," said Geoff Tailor, chief executive of BPI, representing record labels.

While this code will be a good addition in the fight against piracy, it won't actually have much of an impact. As Google has said on countless occasions, pirate sites don't actually get much traffic via search engines. It seems that the copyright holders and the government officials don't really understand how this whole business works because most people who choose to pirate content have their preferred sites which they visit directly; they don't use search engines to look for the content they want.

Google has been demoting pirate sites in its search engine for years, and so has Bing. They have also been taking down millions upon millions of URLs connected to online piracy at the demand of the copyright holders. It seems that they've all just finally agreed to roll out this code just to prove a point.