The Pirate Google: Google liable for copyright infringement?

In response to the verdict in the Pirate Bay trial, an anonymous user has created a site called ‘The Pirate Google’. It uses Google’s search engine to search exclusively for .torrent files (by automatically appending the search command :torrent to every search). The user says his or her goals is:

“to show the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites.”

However, this protest, while a handy tool for pirates, fails to convince. First of all, I highly doubt it that the entertainment industry is scared of Google’s political and legal clout (mind you, they slapped YouTube with a billion dollar lawsuit), but  more importantly the underlying argument that Google is the same as the Pirate Bay is ultimately flawed.

Like I argued in this article, Google and The Pirate Bay are a world apart. In a nutshell: Google searches everything while the Pirate Bay provides a framework that mainly facilitates piracy.

But how about this new implementation of Google’s search engine? Who is liable for that? Nobody? Google? The Pirate Google? Or the sight that hosts the .torrents that are found? My answer would be the site that hosts the .torrents.

When you type in ‘The Dark Knight’ on the Pirate Google, it will use Google’s search engine to point you to sites like torrentreactor.net and torrentportal.com. These sites contain the actual torrents and provide more or less the same services as the Pirate Bay. Given the outcome in the Pirate Bay trial it is highly likely that these services are liable for hosting the .torrents and providing the same framework for piracy the Pirate Bay does.

But what about Google then? Why aren’t they liable? Google is (most likely) not liable for contributory copyright infringement and vicarious liability because its search engine has ‘substantial non infringing uses’. This criterium, set forth in the case of Sony versus Universal, dictates that if a service has many other uses than the infringing one, a ‘safe harbour’ applies to that service. This means that it cannot be held liable.

So you see, no double standards… just the law.