French Supreme Court Orders Google To Remove Piracy Keywords From Autocomplete
It seems the French Supreme Court is jumping on the censorship bandwagon, although to a much more modest extent. They have ordered Google to stop promoting piracy by removing keywords that autocomplete makes use of. These consist of words such as torrent, rapidshare, megaupload, and more. Essentially when you search for something, like say Photoshop, Google’s autocomplete will turn up choices like Photoshop torrent, or Photoshop rapidshare, etc. This extends to almost everything on the net for the most part. The good news here is the French Supreme Court doesn’t see Google as the one at fault for these links as they are not the ones hosting the infringing content. With that said, searching Photoshop torrent will still bring up hundreds of links but with this change at least searching for Photoshop alone will no longer direct you to illegal downloads. This form of compliance seems relatively harmless and appropriate as simple search will no longer promote pirating of content. While this may only apply in the United Kingdom and France at this point in time, it may spread to other European Union nations. If it does, at least this isn’t a harbinger of net neutrality’s death or global censorship of the internet.
The French Supreme Court has ordered that Google should strop promoting online piracy by ceasing to autocomplete terms with words such as “torrent”, “rapidshare” and “megaupload”. Google instant and autocomplete searches were adding piracy related keywords to searches for popular artists. For instance if you were to input “Rolling Stones 40 Licks” the search engine may suggest within the dropdown list of choices some extended phrases such as “Rolling Stones 40 Licks torrent” or “Rolling Stones 40 Licks rapidshare”.
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