For most of 2024, major football leagues in Spain and Italy have regularly used the media to criticize and then publicly threaten Google. Rightsholders have always criticized Google but this feels a bit different.
More recently, flare-ups have coincided with rightsholders demanding that Google implements new, controversial anti-piracy measures, such as remotely deleting apps from users’ phones. Whether any discussions take place in private is unclear. But from the outside, subsequent one-sided criticism of Google’s response to piracy via the media, suggests that differences still exist.
Recent Allegations
Criticism rose again via Italian media during October, with headlines such as ‘TV rights and piracy, Serie A ready to sue Google‘ and variations thereof. The common theme in these reports are allegations that Google receives takedown notices from football league Serie A but then ignores them; all part of a reluctance to collaborate on anti-piracy matters in general, the allegations claim.
To a background of Google receiving its 10 billionth URL removal request just over a week ago, and limited complaints along similar lines from elsewhere, ignoring takedown notices seems unlikely. At the very least, it’s lacking context in the bigger picture.
Transparency Helps to Settle Disputes
Details of specific complaints haven’t been made public but multiple reports state that Serie A’s complaints relate to Google’s alleged failures in the current season, which started mid-August. The table below shows takedown notices filed by Serie A or appointed agents between May 26 and September 23, 2024.
Serie A appears to use more than one account when filing takedown notices, including Lega Nazionale Professionisti Serie A and Liga Nacional de Fütbol Profesional, which we’ll return to in a moment.
The complaint at the bottom of the table dated May 26 was sent before the season began but is relevant in the bigger picture. It requested the removal of 84 URLs, of which Google deleted 12% from search results. Since the remaining 88% of URLs in the notice did not actually exist in Google’s search indexes when the notice was sent, removal was impossible.
Google Processes Unnecessarily Confusing Complaints
Here’s where things become unnecessarily complicated. The May 26 takedown notice was sent by an agent; more specifically a company called Sportian, the anti-piracy company previously known as LaLiga Tech, owned by top tier Spanish football league, LaLiga. The full takedown notice, courtesy of the Lumen Database, can be viewed here with a sample of the not-in-index URLs shown below.
At the time of writing, a total of 3,530 individual requests filed with Google under the Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional account have requested the removal of 437,524 URLs. Google went on to remove 49.8% of that total, could not remove 23.3% because they did not exist in its indexes and a further 3.3% because the same URLs were duplicates of previously reported links.
The issue here is that Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional isn’t a reference to Serie A; it’s actually Sportiva using the full name of Spanish football league LaLiga in its unlikely capacity as a takedown agent for Serie A.
While there doesn’t appear to be anything nefarious going on here, takedown fraud thrives on convoluted situations not dissimilar to this. If given time to do its job, Google often identifies abuses and prevents them from doing damage.
Despite a hall of mirrors, Google still processed the notices and also took down whatever it was able to take down. According to Google data on all of Serie A accounts mentioned earlier, 70.2% of all URLs requested for takedown do not exist in its search indexes so are impossible to delete.
Season Begins With a Change of Tactics
The Serie A notices dated Aug 22, Aug 27, and September 3, were not sent to Google from its usual accounts. Instead, they were filed by SP Tech, the law firm/anti-piracy company behind the Piracy Shield platform.
Those three notices contain just 12 URLs in total, of which Google removed none.
After sending takedown notices listing specific URLs and infringing content as required under the DMCA, there’s a very clear switch here to domain-based takedown notices that appear to identify no infringing content at all.
Indeed, while these domains appear to link to sites that may well offer IPTV packages containing Serie A matches, the DMCA states that takedown notices must contain sufficient information for the recipient to identify and remove the infringing content.
Clash of Legal Requirements
Under Law n. 93 of 14 July 2023, which has been in force in Italy since August 8, 2023, service providers and ISPs are required to block or otherwise prevent access to infringing content within 30 minutes of receiving an instruction from Piracy Shield; a system to which Google is not currently connected.
Even if Google deindexed the domains in Serie A’s notices, that wouldn’t prevent access to any IPTV streams. That’s something this law does not consider. These are blocking and deindexing orders made with no judicial oversight, that have shown to be erroneous on several occasions, with Google itself blocked in error a matter of weeks ago.
The exact reasons for Google currently rejecting domain-only takedown/deindexing demands are unknown. In the UK and the Netherlands, Google has been deindexing entire pirate sites since 2021. The difference is that rightsholders in both countries previously obtained court orders that provide a legal basis for ISP blocking. Google isn’t even mentioned in those orders, but it cooperates because due process requirements have been met.
In Italy, purely on the word of a rightsholder, who may or may not know the difference between Google Drive and a pirate site on any given day, companies like Google are expected to blindly and immediately follow orders. Thirty minutes is a timeframe that encourages no checks whatsoever, the consequences of which have been widely publicized.
Called Out in Public
Resistance, it appears, can lead to blanket accusations of doing almost nothing to assist rightsholders. As highlighted above, Google does process takedown notices; however, depending on the takedown account held up as proof, Google can be shown to be mostly or even totally non-compliant. The Sp Tech account shown below, which was introduced only recently, is one such example.
Describing Google as generally non-compliant, or even “grossly negligent” according to a recent comment, simply isn’t true. Serie A has another account at Google that’s been in use since January 2019. Over more than five years, Serie A filed 56,847 individual takedown notices that together requested the removal of 1,194,826 URLs.
Of that total, 65.5% of the URLs did not exist in Google search, meaning it was impossible to remove them. Google removed 27.9% of the URLs as requested, leaving duplicate URLs already dealt with and 5.4% for which Google took no action.
While that sounds like a minimum compliance rate of 95%, attention will inevitably focus on the remaining 5% and why those weren’t removed as well. There are many reasons behind Google’s refusals to take action, including protecting innocent parties from abusive or simply careless takedown demands.
That Google continues to do that, even while being publicly disparaged for its apparent failings, is commendable. That it prevented Serie A from deindexing its own website on October 27, is ironic, to put it mildly.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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