The UK Culture Secretary is demanding that Google turn its resources to hunting down those who pirate content.
Jeremy Hunt told eWeek that it is time that Google helped Big Content shut down who ever it thought was a pirate.
He said he will be meet Google and give it a Chinese burn until it agreed to help out his entertainment business chums.
What Hunt wants is for search engines, advertisers and credit card companies should go further to "make life more difficult" for online pirates.
He said that if a court deems a site to be unlawful the government wants search engines to push it down the rankings to stifle traffic and at the same time cut off advertising or payment revenues to make the site economically unviable.
His logic is based on the much touted Hollywood myth that people who share files are making shedloads of its cash, and are not normal people who want to see Torchwood at the same time as those in the United States.
Hunt said that in the absence of an industry-led solution the government is apparently prepared to use the upcoming Communications Bill to legislate.
The government has previously demanded that ISPs cut off pirate sites and users who infringe copyright. This has been challenged in court by BT and TalkTalk and ISPs have proposed an independent watchdog with the power to blacklist sites.
Hunt said that online businesses deserve the same legal protection and rights as offline, physical ones.
He insists that he is not propping up movie and music industry mogols who will not move with the times.
However he said that the new models will never be able to prosper if they have to compete with free alternatives based on the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
The question is if laws are needed. Google insists it already deals with requests from copyright holders within four hours.
One might suggest that if Hunt wants to end the problems of online piracy in the UK, he might encourage the film industry to pull finger and develop a proper movie streaming service in the EU.
"Jeremy Hunt: Yes, but the other point I would make is that there may be other ways to do this. One of them, for example, is making it harder to find those sites on search engines like Google. One of the encouraging things that has happened as a result of roundtables that have been set up by Ed Vaizey has been that Google is co-operating in a way that has not happened previously. It is now much harder to find many of those sites than it has been before, but I am sure there is much more work that can be done."
So what's changed that Google is no longer co-operating?
background : http://scibella.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/the-lion-the-lamb-shall-lie-down-together/
Take it a step further - launch a consumer campaign along the lines of 'If it's not your's, ask permission to use, don't steal'.
Image owners suffer the same problems when their work is downloaded and used by commercial companies and publishers to support and sell their own commercial products - often with no source credits or permission and nearly always without payment.
ISP's and online publishers need to take responsibility and up their game - not just build their content and ad revenues off of the back and often at the expense of creative industries, content creators and so forth.
Start sharing the revenues and improving the content quality for all users.
A freeconomy will not result in growth, innovation or economic sustanability
Take it a step further - launch a consumer campaign along the lines of 'If it's not your's, ask permission to use, don't steal'.
Image owners suffer the same problems when their work is downloaded and used by commercial companies and publishers to support and sell their own commercial products - often with no source credits or permission and nearly always without payment.
ISP's and online publishers need to take responsibility and up their game - not just build their content and ad revenues off of the back and often at the expense of creative industries, content creators and so forth.
Start sharing the revenues and improving the content quality for all users.
A freeconomy will not result in growth, innovation or economic sustanability