Google failing to fight music piracy, says new report

The UK Government’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee has released a report that “strongly condemn the failure” of search engine Google to combat online copyright infringement.

Despite reputed falls in illegal music downloads, and new measures to combat law-breaking sites, the ‘Supporting the creative economy’ report focuses upon “the “notable” failure of Google in particular to tackle access of copyright infringing websites through its search engine.”

The report, which can be read in full here, says that recent work by trade association the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) showed that from “a cross-section of searches of the type + + “mp3””, 61% of the top 10 sites in the Google results were “infringing sites,” a reduction of only 2% since this time last year.

“This headline figure sums up the inadequacy of Google’s response in the context of illegal downloading, though we acknowledge that is just one way in which music is now consumed online. Google cannot claim ignorance over the scale of illegal activity on the internet.”

Last September, data from Musicmetric showed which artists were the subject of illegal downloads in different areas. Drake was the most pirated artist in the U.S, while Ed Sheeran took that honour in the UK. Pitbull, AKA Mr Worldwide, was the artist of choice for Hungarian pirates.

Chair of the Committee, Conservative MP John Whittingdale, said: “The continuing promotion of illegal content through search engines is simply unacceptable, and efforts to stop it have so far been derisory. There is no reason why they cannot demote and ultimately remove sites hosting large amounts of illegal material from search engine results.”

Whittingdale claimed that online piracy is “a serious crime that threatens our economic future.”

[via MusicWeek]