Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

[BrianBosworth]

It’s taken a while, but Google has finally caved in to pressure from the entertainment industries including the MPAA and RIAA. The search engine now actively censors terms including BitTorrent, torrent, utorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload from its instant and autocomplete services. The reactions from affected companies and services are not mild, with BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo all speaking out against this act of commercial censorship.

The entertainment industries’ quest to root out piracy on the Internet has yet again resulted in commercial censorship. A few weeks ago Google announced that it would start filtering “piracy related” terms from its ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘ services and today they quietly rolled out this questionable feature.

Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More | TorrentFreak

[SaintShaolin]

I think the autocomplete is still working with rapidshare, at least here in the Philippines.

[slikrapid]

it’s taken a while, but Google has finally caved in to pressure from the entertainment industries including the MPAA and RIAA...The entertainment industries’ quest to root out piracy on the Internet has yet again resulted in commercial censorship.

make no mistake, google is not your friend - its the old strategy of good cop (google) - bad cop (riaa & co.) - if google wanted to actively/heavily censor p2p & och material it would be quite easy to do, the goal is not to stop filesharing (or 'root it out'), but rather to let it operate in a gray area since it is more profitable that way and it remains a constant useful scapegoat/threat & reason/justification for other intrusive measures (like censorship/filtering, monitoring/spying, lawsuits, regulation/laws,...)

[l0cke]

Here in Italy the autocomplete is still working well too: I've tried with bittorrent, megaupload, megavideo and the search engine shows me everything with no problems. But I agree totally with slikrapid. Filesharing it's definitively a scapegoat to introduce deeper censhorship methods. Maybe it's time, for me, to switch to bing. Google, you disappointed me :-\

[Resurrection]

I don't understand why Google is being labeled a sell-out

They aren't censoring results just disabling auto-complete...

[Caramba]

haha and who search torrent with google? the news are little funny

when anyone wanna search torrents on public trackers then can he use isohunt.com and not google :)

---------- Post added at 12:17 ---------- Previous post was at 12:16 ----------

haha and who search torrent with google? the news are little funny

when anyone wanna search torrents on public trackers then can he use isohunt.com and not google :)

[Gapo]

I don't understand why Google is being labeled a sell-out

They aren't censoring results just disabling auto-complete...

That's their defense, most likely. It's censoring because they're disabling exactly those auto-complete features.