According to media reports, Google and other search engines could ban torrent websites from the results page. But the story based on a report on TorrentFreak does not directly indicate any possible ban on such website searches. There was a discussion between search engine companies like Google and entertainment companies, chaired by UK’s Intellectual Property Office. The report suggested that the discussions were on implementing a voluntary code of conduct with an aim to deal with online piracy. There is no mention of the words ‘ban’ or ‘torrent’ in the report posted on TorrentFreak.
If you go through the report on the discussions, you will realise that all such reports that claim that Google will ban torrent websites from search results are merely a speculation as there is no confirmed on the same. Google might not even be thinking about taking such a decision. This does not take away from the fact that Google, the world’s biggest search platform, has been taking its initiatives in battling copyright issues. Google in its ‘How to fight piracy’ report last year said that it has been taking almost all the takedown requests from Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a United States copyright law. According to Google, it has been taking fast actions to take down infringing web pages from its search results, by handling thousands of requests every day.
Google’s efforts in its fight against piracy, has reaped benefits so much so that the search results have come down a lot, especially on popular torrent websites and biggest offenders like The Pirate Bay and Torrentz. However, smaller torrent sites and illegal streaming sites are still present in the results, but the effort that Google has been taking is commendable. It is also not possible for Google to ban such a huge number of torrent websites, apart from the fact that the company is all against censorship.
Baroness Buscombe, an English barrister, regulator and politician was quoted in the original report as saying, “The search engines involved in this work have been very co-operative, making changes to their algorithms and processes, but also working bilaterally with creative industry representatives to explore the options for new interventions, and how existing processes might be streamlined.” This, in no way, is an indicator on any ban on torrent sites.
So, this necessarily means that torrent websites are here to stay, just that their search results can go further down in the results on Google and other websites like Bing. But users can still directly go to the torrent websites and download.
