As you may or may not know, Russia’s new anti-piracy law continues to be reviewed and tested. The amendments to the controversial law have just passed their first reading. But what has everyone holding their breath is the intention to expand the legislation to address search engine results. Google and Russia’s leading search engine Yandex are extremely concerned by the proposals. This interesting topic was found on Torrent Freak in their post, “Copyright Holders Propose Unprecedented Search Engine Manipulation.”
Publishers of music, books and software have put forward amendments which will place a huge burden of responsibility not just on regular websites but also on search engines. If this legislation passes, when a user searches for a particular song using Google, in the background the search engine would be required to carry out a search on a national database created from a national registry listing all music, software, and books. If the track is present, then Google would be obliged to list official sources for the content in the first pages of results while automatically relegating other sites.
This will be worth watching to see how it develops in Russia, as it may set precedents for other countries and applications.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
