The Motion Picture Association of America took another swipe at Google today, releasing a report that states the obvious: Google's search engine sometimes leads to pirate sites.
None of this is news to anyone. But the MPAA's report comes as the Commerce Department is mulling proposals on how it could assist the private sector to voluntarily combat piracy. The MPAA -- the lobbying arm of the major motion picture studios -- told the department last month that "corporate ethics" (.pdf) require "all players in the internet ecosystem" to fight piracy.
Today's study (.pdf) -- which found that for all infringing URLs the MPAA found through search engines, 82 percent came from Google -- is likely intended as a shot across Google's bow that if it doesn't take action, lawmakers might.
"This study shows that there is much more that search engines must do when it comes to pointing consumers towards legal outlets. By supporting legitimate sites rather than illegal ones, everyone wins – content creators, the U.S. economy, and consumers themselves," Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) said in a statement.
Google declined comment.
In a report the search giant published this month, called "How Google Fights Piracy," Google said that "Search is not a major driver of traffic to pirate sites."
Google said it receives more than 3 billion search queries a day.
"The good news is that the most popular queries relating to movies, music, books, video games, and other copyrighted works return results that do not include links to infringing materials," Google's report said. "This is thanks to both our constant improvements to the algorithms that power Google Search, and the efforts of rights holders to prioritize and target their copyright removal notices."
Meanwhile, the MPAA told the Commerce Department last month and reiterated it again in today's report that Google's year-old change to its search algorithm has not reduced piracy. Google announced in August 2012 that it altered its algorithm to lower the search ranking of sites that receive a multitude of takedown notices from rights holders. The MPAA said today that there was "no evidence" reducing piracy.
Among the MPAA study's other findings:
*Search engines refer more than "4 billion visits per year" to infringing sites.
*Fifty-eight percent of consumer search queries have "generic or title-specific keywords only." This means that " consumers who were not even seeking infringing content in the first place were directed there regardless."
*All search engines "influenced" about one-fifth "of the sessions in which consumers accessed infringing TV or film content online between 2010 and 2012."
*About three-fourths of those surveyed for the study said they used a search engine to discover infringing sites.
