RIAA: Google and Bing should censor pirate sites

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) wants search engines to take actions to censor pirate sites. Such a proposal was made by RIAA CEO Cary Sherman in a testimony before Congress.

RIAA claims that priority in search results should be given to legitimate music services, while pirate sites must be left behind.

“We hope other intermediaries like search engines will follow suit in negotiating voluntary marketplace best practices to prevent directing users to sites that are dedicated to violating property rights,” Sherman claimed.

“Sites that engage in infringing activity should not appear as the first results when searching for what entertainment content to download or stream. This just leads to more piracy and popularity of the site,” the RIAA stated.

Association believes that Google will take the appropriate measures to reduce the number of complaints that come from copyright holders.

Earlier Google, Bing and Yahoo! were asked to follow the “Voluntary Code of Practice”, the contents of which were not disclosed. However, it is known that under the law the copyright holders ask search engines to de-index substantially infringing sites.