While much of the filesharing and anti-filesharing world are transfixed by the courtroom games in Sweden, I just noticed that Google seems to be making all of this moot by removing the need for PirateBay. Google seems to be happy to index the Torrent sites and that means there's no need to become a member at Pirate Bay to search for content. Google has found enough trackers that do this for free that it makes it possible to find the content for free.
I noticed this when I typed "Young Indiana Jones Love's Sweet Song" into Google and found:
- Some pointers to imdb, trailerfan, allmovie and flixster.
- Pointers to Torrentz, btjunkie and isohunt
- Pointer to TheRaider (a fan site).
- Pointer to Barnes and Nobel
That is, three places where you can download the episode of "Young Indiana Jones" and one place where you can actually pay for it. The place where you can pay for it isn't first or even near the top.
Notice that I didn't even give an indication that I wanted to download the episode. If I type in "download Indiana Jones", almost all of the responses are for either bittorrent sites or sites offering me the movie in an embedded player. There's even one from http://fullscreenmovies.net/ that promises to let me download a complete copy of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" for just $2.99. I would be surprised to learn that they're paying all of the right royalties from that $2.99.
To test how helpful Google can be, I decided to imagine the most unsavory movie for young men, the demographic that seems to spend most of their time at these sites. I'm guessing this because the ads that support these places are mainly for pornography.
The first movie that came to mind is "Beaches", a real tear jerker with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. It's old and it's filled with middle aged women talking. And boy do they talk and talk without a car chase or a good gun fight to add some zing. Then there's a sad ending -- one dies from cancer -- and it comes with no silver lining. It's a tough slice of life. When the movie came out, I remember sitting in a theater between my sister and her best friend. When the weepie ending came along, the two of them reached over me to hold hands.
What does typing "Beaches torrent" into Google get you? Links to btscene, extratorrent, torrentdownloads, fulldls, isohunt, sumotorrent, torrentreactor, and torrenz. There are no articles about, say, torrents of waves from Hurricane Katrina crashing upon the beaches near New Orleans. Some of the sites that appeared in the search for "beaches torrent" offered downloads still shots of beautiful beaches, at least according to the text, but they were still bit torrent sites not plain sites. It was easy to find a copy of the 1988 movie with Bette Midler in the mix.
You get the same kind of results when you key in "pride and prejudice torrent", "nine to five torrent", "thelma and louise torrent" and even "my fair lady torrent". All generate plenty of pointers to the movies.
It seems like the word "torrent" is permanently bound to downloading undocumented copies.
In the eyes of the Google page rank algorithm, the word "torrent" seems to mean "bit torrent". To try another test, I just typed in "torrent" into the search box. After paging through the results, I couldn't find a link that wasn't related to downloading until I got to the fourth page. There it was: a lone link to Pontiac.com's page devoted to the 2008 car named "Torrent".
I should note that a few of these websites were for obviously legitimate copies blessed by the copyright owner. One offered Linux distros while another was run by the browser company, Opera.com to distribute their browser. But even these obviously legal ones were almost as scarce as the site for the Pontiac Torrent. The vast majority of the sites offered up were devoted to finding torrents of content that the site owners claim they have no idea is in any way involved with copyright infringement. Wink. Wink.
It's fascinating to game this out. My guess is that Google hasn't paid much attention to the way they're taking over Pirate Bay's business because the indexer is just a big machine that they wound up and set on the floor over ten years ago. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, "The spiders crawl out, slurping verb and noun. That's not my department says Werner von Braun."
There may even be some weird part of the search engine that is actively reacting to the clicks that people make. The vast hordes of download crazed clickers have effectively dictated that there's really only one meaning of the word "torrent" now. The AI buried in Google is just reacting and reflecting the new reality. There must be some way for them to steer the dreadnought spider toward things like, say, Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "The Torrent" and away from the unprotected content.
In any case, I think Google is going to have to choose its friends. The torrent sites don't buy ads and they don't seem to sell them either. There were no ads displayed along the searches for "Beaches torrent", "download Indiana Jones", or most of the other searches.
There were two ads available when I typed in "torrent": one for the poor, attention-starved Pontiac car, and another for PirateSpider.com, a site that seems intent on making its name among people with an anathema to picking up the check. I'm not sure of their business model, but I would like to have the backers that are happy to be funding these ads to attract non-paying customers.
Only Google knows how much cash they're raking in from directing people to the torrent sites. The main search pages may not show ads, but you can bump into them pretty easily. PirateSpider, for instance, was showing Google Adwords alongside the searches for freely shared content.
My guess is that they're missing a big opportunity here. Why not send searches for "Beaches torrent" to the page at Amazon or Barnes and Nobel that actually sells the movie? Those companies or any of the other DVD merchants have a business model that can support paying for ads. The content creators can pay for the ads that support the hybrid cars, the free-range protein and the hot tubs. The torrent sites can't.
Of course, there's one problem in directing sites like "Beaches Torrent" to a website that actually sells legit copies. The users will stop clicking on these and then well, where would we be? Perhaps people would develop a new slang word. ISO seems to be a rising term that seems to apply more to complete rips of DVDs than to the International Standards Organization or the personals section. But at least the Pontiac Torrent will be locatable again on the web.
I think things look bad for Pirate Bay. While they may enjoy their time in the spotlight and they may even manage to throw enough logical sabots into the Swedish legal system, Google and this vast army of volunteers is slowly grabbing all of the traffic. You might say that Google and the others were offering a free version of a resource that Pirate Bay pioneered and put behind a paywall. It couldn't happen to nicer people.