As the EU moved ahead toward approving the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a U.K. group has revealed what rightsholders really want from search engines.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was signed yesterday by the European Commission, leading to protests across the continent. But the U.K.'s Open Rights Group has also revealed that rightsholders want search engines to de-index pirate sites without even a court order.

The document, obtained by the ORG through a Freedom of Information request, shows that one of the proposals suggests search engines "stop indexing websites that are subject to court orders while establishing suitable procedures to de-index substantially infringing sites."

That clause appears to imply that search engines would voluntarily eliminate sites that they believed harbored infringing materials.

The document was apparently circulated during recent discussions between rightsholders and government officials within the U.K.'s Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Rightsholders included BPI, Motion Pictures Association, PACT, The Premier League, and the Publishers Association.

According to minutes of an earlier Nov. 15 meeting obtained by the ORG, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all agreed to a research paper, authored by Google and due in the first quarter of 2012, that would "provide a shared evidence base and analysis of piracy on the web and how it can be best tackled."

The minutes also claimed that the search engines would draft a "code of conduct" to guide their behavior. Representatives from Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Both Google and Bing prominently display links to sites that host pirated content, the rightsholders claimed. About four of the first 10 links generated by Google were to infringing sites hosting pirated e-books, according to April 2011 research conducted by the Publishers Association, versus about two of the first 10 Bing results. The first infringing link in Google's results averaged between third and fourth, and between fourth and fifth on Bing. The research also found that Google returned 18 percent more infringing links than during an Oct. 2010 study.

"While it will remain necessary for rightsholders to send takedown notices to illegal sites, and to continue to work with search engines to improve the procedures for de-listing sites and individual content items in search results, it is clear that the current regime will not be sufficient to ensure that search engines direct consumers first and foremost to legal places to acquire digital content," the report concludes. "To achieve that, search engines will need to do more."

The Proposals

As stated, the proposal paper suggests search engines should:

"assign lower rankings to sites that repeatedly make available unlicensed content in breach of copyright;



prioritize websites that obtain certification as a licensed site under a recognised scheme;



stop indexing websites that are subject to court orders while establishing suitableprocedures to de-index substantially infringing sites;



continue to improve the operation of the 'notice and takedown' system and ensure that search engines do not encourage consumers towards illegal sites via suggested searches;related searches and suggested sites;

