I'm on the rocks about how I feel about this.
On one hand, Google seems to simply be patching up some glaring holes in their search engine that inadvertently gives a glaring helping hand to piracy. Torrent sites and other piracy-geared sites are found with laughable ease, and even its autocomplete feature seems to expedite the piracy process. Typing in "Super scribblenauts" in Google's search bar will introduce the suggestion "Super Scribblenauts Rom". In this light, Google seems to be applying these measures in an effort to amend their own shortcomings. Being the internet superpower they are, this is all but necessary.
However, it remains to be seen if Google is planning to do more, and actually take an initiative in the extermination of piracy. This may not bode well for many sites such as GBAtemp, if this is the case. Take jumpman17's example of Youtube's inconsistent moderation:
jumpman17 said:
I think they need to first learn what the law allows though. I was in a team that made a 30 second ad for a video production class. We used about 20 seconds of the Sanford and Son theme song. This was for educational use, not for any form of profit, should qualify for fair use, and only posted to our teacher's YouTube site for the class (being the way we would always submit our final videos for grading). They denied the video claiming copyright infringement. We filed a review request for fair use, explained everything, even submitted a signed letter from out teacher. They still denied it.
It's a well-known fact that Youtube's governance of copyrighted content is sort of puzzling. Imagine if this brand of hit-or-miss moderation was incorporated into Google's search engine. This would result in many sites like GBAtemp potentially getting blocked from their search results, because Google jumped the gun and mistook it for a piracy site. I shudder at the thought of this.
However, it's my belief that doing this would be far too time-consuming, expensive, and futile for Google. There are simply too many sites to monitor, for far too many transgressions. Piracy in particular is quite an opus, and in my opinion, it's damn near impossible to completely eradicate. From this perspective, the thought of Google doing anything particularly radical seems unlikely, at least at this point in time.
So, I don't know. I'm not anticipating any radical change, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
