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Google: We're Not Like Pirate Bay

In the wake of a Swedish court's decision to imprison the operators of The Pirate Bay, a Web site that helps users search for BitTorrent files in the same way that Google handles general Internet file searches, Google wants to make sure everyone understands that it's no Pirate Bay.

Responding to comparisons of Google and The Pirate Bay -- a functional similarity underscored by The Pirate Bay's use on its home page of a Google-style "I'm Feeling Lucky" button -- Marco Pancino, Google's European policy counsel, stresses that Google respects the rights of copyright holders.

"To meet the needs of holders of intellectual property rights, Google has designed a set of procedures for reporting and removing the content on its search engine of copyright infringement," wrote Pancino, as translated by Google, in a blog post penned in Italian.

Forget for a moment that those procedures remain open to abuse, leading to the removal of legitimate uses of copyrighted material. Google, says Pancino, is like a highway and cannot be held responsible for the conduct of bad drivers.

But Pancino's argument isn't entirely convincing because it conflates Google's search function with its content hosting capabilities, as delivered by YouTube and other services. The fact is that Google Search and The Pirate Bay do perform very similar functions.

What makes Google different isn't so much the accommodation is makes to copyright holders in its hosting services like YouTube; it's that the Google user experience when searching for specific file types, like .torrent files, isn't as elegant as The Pirate Bay user experience.

With Google, searching for .torrent files is best done using the filetype: torrent operator, which takes a bit more effort than the typical keyword search. With The Pirate Bay, no search operator is necessary because it only searches for .torrent files.

That's not much of a difference because Google and The Pirate Bay aren't that different. But what little difference there is -- a willingness to consider the concerns of copyright holders -- may be the difference between survival as a business and legal suffocation.

The interesting question here remains unresolved: Should it be illegal to direct people to certain information? And if so, can any such requirement avoid violating First Amendment rights in the U.S.?

Or perhaps more to the point, can any such requirement really be enforced, given the complex nature and global reach of the Internet?

And if it can't be enforced, is it worth bothering to try?

Is shutting down file sharing sites destined to be as futile as Prohibition or the War on Drugs? Or is futility a form of job security for file sharing foes in the litigation and security industries?

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