"The Gloves are off" - Copyright Industry Calls for Broad Search Engine Censorship.

Copyright Industry Calls for Broad Search Engine Censorship.(TF).At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.It’s no secret that the entertainment industries believe search engines are not delivering enough when it comes to protecting copyright works. Just last month, the RIAA and IFPI accused Google of massively profiting from piracy, while putting up barriers to make life difficult for rightsholders.
If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear.
The document, which describes a government-overlooked “Voluntary Code of Practice” for search engines, was not intended for public consumption but the Open Rights Group obtained it through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.
In short, the rightsholders want the search engines to make substantial changes so that pirated content becomes harder to find, or is de-listed entirely. In addition, they want to boost the rankings of licensed content. Below are the three new measures they propose.

• Assign lower rankings to sites that repeatedly make available unlicensed content in breach of copyright
• Stop indexing websites that are subject to court orders while establishing suitable procedures to de-index substantially infringing sites
• In the document rightsholders explain that they find it inexcusable that some websites – Pirate Bay and Isohunt in particular – are still indexed by all major search engines even though courts have ruled they facilitate copyright infringementPrioritize websites that obtain certification as a licensed site under a recognised scheme.

Hmmmm.......“We would propose that prioritisation be enabled for searches that contain any of the following key search terms: “mp3″, “flac”, “wma”, “aac”, “torrent”, “download”, “rip”, “stream” or “listen”, “free”, when combined with an artist name, song or album title contained on a list to be regularly updated and provided to a search engine by a recognised and properly mandated agency representing rights holders for a particular sector, such as BPI.”Read the full story here.