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Google open waters for pirates?

With the high profile convictions and sentencing of the 2 men behind Pirate Bay, a web site that acted as an indexing service for those who share software and media files, will this leave an opening that only indexing giant Google can fill online?

It’s no secret to anybody who has spent much time surfing the web, or scanning technology book covers at Barnes & Noble, that there are special “Google Hacks” which allow searchers to find obscure and often intentionally unpublicized files online, as well as illegal file sharing archives.

I attended a Genealogy convention in Pittsburgh about 6 or 7 years ago where hacking Google search for public records was a featured workshop. Most of the same “hacks” also work on Yahoo or MSN, but Google will almost always return thousands more results and often they’ll have the best results for the searcher on the front page, making it the fastest and easiest search engine of the three for hunting specific files.

The bottom line is, Google is a very powerful search tool for anyone who knows how to use it, or bothers to click the “Advanced Search” link from its home page, and tens of thousands–if not more–of illegal files are already indexed by the search engine for anyone who wants to find them.

Which sort of begs the question, if it was a criminal offense for Pirate Bay to index illegal file sharing URL’s, why isn’t anyone prosecuting Google, Yahoo or MSN Live for the same thing? A simple search on any of them for almost any “Movie Title” +”full download” will offer up tons of results for illegal copies of movies, including films currently still in theaters, and in at least one case a film that hasn’t even reached the theaters yet.

We’re not suggesting that the convictions or sentences of the Pirate Bay folks were wrong by any means, that’s a moral question for every individual to decide for themselves.

However, like many who are discussing this online recently, we’re curious as to why the movie industry and legal authorities have turned a completely blind eye to the largest indexes of illegal file sharing on the web, the major search engine indexes.

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