HOT SEAT
Google isnét just popular, ités beloved. But its halo has been tarnished by the companyés acceptance of the-safe harboré offered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The law protects search engines from liability when they link to pages that infringe copyrights. The catch: To gain protection, they must remove offending links on request — which Google gladly does, pointing instead to the request itself. Has the Webés best index compromised its mission? Google cofounder Larry Page explains.
WIRED: Why has Google chosen to seek safe harbor under the DMCA?
PAGE: There are a lot of nice things about the DMCA. It protects us from liability. But weéve taken a progressive approach by directing readers to the complaint when a link is taken down. So people who have issues with our removing a link, or who think it was removed for the wrong reasons, can easily find out exactly what weéve done and why.
Once a link has been removed, hasnét the damage to your index already been done?
Copyright exists to protect peopleés creations and their right to profit from them. If we donét respect it, weére going to discourage creation of content, which is what we live on.
Your terms of service say you donét screen sites before linking to them and you donét manipulate search results, which are generated by software without human intervention. Doesnét removing links on request show that you can and do screen results?
DMCA requests donét cause us to raise a pageés rank, which is what we mean by manipulation. Out of the billions of pages listed in our index, only a few may be removed in a week. When we receive a request, ités almost always because someone is violating the law. In most cases, the page itself is going to come down, since the people who made the request will go after the ISP that hosts the page as well. And as soon as a page comes down, ités removed from our index. So what would happen anyway is just happening a little faster.
It sounds as though you assume that all allegations of infringement are valid.
No, not at all. But when weére notified of something, we have an obligation to do the right thing. We need to be responsive to peopleés rights.
Could the DMCA be abused by powerful interests hoping to silence critics or competitors?
That has happened, but not much. What concerns us more is that countries are taking an increasingly active role in deciding which Internet traffic can cross their borders. We have offices in places that may decide, willy-nilly, that weére liable for linking to the wrong sites.
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