Top Search Engines to Kick Down Pirate Sites to Cyber Oblivion in UK Anti-Piracy Initiative

Due to the freest nature of the World Wide Web, pirate sites cannot be totally exterminated from cyberspace but these can be kicked down to rock bottom in the bed of cyber oblivion no less than by the world's top search engines. In the UK, the fight against online piracy using the search engines has recently taken off. Tech observers have been seeing this UK initiative as a model for the rest of the world to replicate.

U.S. search engine giants Google and Microsoft's Bing and representative organizations of creative industries in the UK are currently hammering out at present the final code of practice geared at demoting illegal and pirate websites. The final code is expected to be out by summer.

The other signatories, British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and Motion Picture Association and Alliance for Intellectual Property lauded the move of Google and Microsoft as an important step to greatly reduce online privacy that hugely eats up sales due to illegal downloads from the $108 billion-a-year creative industries in the UK. The parties agreed to make and explore more ways, techniques and matrix to easily lead UK consumers to legitimate contents, and away from copyright-infringing websites.

"The Code will not be a silver bullet fix, but it will mean that illegal sites are demoted more quickly from search results and that fans searching for music are more likely to find a fair site," BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor said. The demotion provisions seem to call for a regular crackdown as links to pirate websites will be blocked immediately on the first page of search results.

The sought-after technical-programming practices have been laid out in the code like the improvement of autocomplete suggestions that avoid links to pirate and copyright-infringing sites including those that contain malware. This UK initiative came out from the long discussions of the parties to fight online piracy and copyright infringement of websites illegally giving downloads of TV, music, stream films, sports programs, and other creations.

The UK started this first major step through its Intellectual Property Office and in cooperation with the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS). The UK government has long complained over the delay of U.S. tech giants to make concrete steps to stamp out online copyright infringement.

The IPO of UK in its research said that at least 15 percent of UK internet users are downloading copyright-protected films, music tracks, TV programs and others from infringing sites. In the first half of 2016, these copyrighted products were downloaded from illegal online sources at least 129 million times.

BPI said that since 2011 it has sent over 450 million notices to Microsoft's Bing (183,333,358) and Google (274,807,342) combined for its program of notifications to search engines to remove links to infringing contents in their search results. The organization said it will continue this program and its critical role in the parties efforts to demote illegal websites and their links.