I see moves like this as seriously harmful. By removing popular pirate sites (already shady enough), search engines steer traffic to even worse places: referral spam blogs, mirrors with malware-laden ads, abandoned and spam-filled forums, etc. Boosting these sites directly aids malware campaigns like SocGholish that use poorly secured blogs and forums to spread trojans that are then used to give access to ransomware operators, like WastedLocker (which has no qualms with targeting hospitals). But Hollywood's imaginary lost revenues justify any unintended consequences, right?
> Who remembers when TPB were going to buy Sealand in order to host trackers out of the reach of authorities?
> Isn't Sealand just a couple of underwater charges planted by some clandestine operatives away from not existing?
> I'd love to see the day we're launching missiles at foreign ships over copyright violations.
Speculating about borderline terrorist behavior is fun but it would surprise no one if it actually happened. Copyright is "legitimate" and so such operations would not even be clandestine. The copyright industry has access to actual police forces who respond with extreme violence whenever someone threatens the artificial scarcity of their imaginary property even though the perpretators are not violent themselves.
The whole Twitch music DMCA fiasco and the obvious outrage of punishing people for playing their favourite tunes in public made a funny thought occur to me. With the trend toward "smart cities" and "smart vehicles" and the increased surveillance that comes with that, how far are we from the day when the smart freeway Content ID's the music you're playing loudly enough for others to hear and shuts down your car speakers? It's a really asinine dystopia we're headed towards.
Yeah. I got that email from Twitch too. It was just an explanation about the DMCA as if we didn't already know. What a joke.
Technology was supposed to enable us to do more as human beings. It was supposed to empower us to do what we want. Instead we're wasting it on these bullshit industries that honestly shouldn't even exist anymore. It's become just yet another form of control meant depower instead of empower. The computer is limitless, they purposefully restrict it just to force people to pay money in order to use it.
They're not the true threats, though. The big picutre is government control of computers. Governments simply cannot handle the notion that people are not under their control. Technology like encryption and anonymization are inherently subversive to any government. They will seek to regulate it, just like they're imposing laws all over the internet today.
Harmful for whom? For common folks, who are trying to download a movie but get a virus instead - yes, very harmful. For the parties who have a say about the situation - not really: Google/Bing/DDG lose nothing (given that all search engines behave the same), "copyright holders" win.
This is a part of the effort to decrease visibility of piracy and to drive to the "freak" zone: "piracy is illegal and dangerous, so better go watch some Netflix, kids!".
And it has been successful so far: how many teenagers you know who pirate stuff? A few generations ago it was normal, but now it isn't.
I think the lesser popularity of piracy with the younger generations is somewhat less about intentional takedown-based anti-piracy efforts and more their preference for mobile devices and the "pirate" options failing to keep up while the legal streaming services are worlds better than they were 10 years ago. Apple not allowing torrent clients on the app store definitely helped, though. That comes back to the broader narrative of the war on general-purpose computers: perhaps the most effective anti-piracy effort of all has been selling people devices that run crippled OSes like iOS and Android instead of Windows.
