‘Dear Rupert’: Google Pens Blog To Murdoch Over Piracy Claims

Rupert Murdoch, billionaire, noted Bond Villain and executive chairman of News Corporation in his spare time, wrote a letter to the EU last week complaining about Google. Murdoch has had a bee in his bonnet about the web giant for some time now, but he’s now specifically alleging that the company is a “platform for piracy”. Google hasn’t taken too kindly to that, and released a rebuttal that it has titled “Dear Rupert”. *grabs popcorn*

Image: Oli Scarff / Getty

Following Rupert Murdoch’s letter to the European Commission bitching about Google last week, Google decided to write its open letter so readers could “judge the arguments on their merits”.

Murdoch claimed in his letter that Google helps to spread piracy and so-called “malicious networks” by ignoring illegal content that can be sourced through its search engine.

Google refuted the claim, saying it executes takedowns on millions of links per year, while also helping to stop the spread of child exploitation material.

Here’s Rupert’s claim and Google’s polite rebuttal:

News Corp:
Google is a “platform for piracy and the spread of malicious networks” and “a company that boasts about its ability to track traffic [but] chooses to ignore the unlawful and unsavoury content that surfaces after the simplest of searches”

Google:
Google has done more than almost any other company to help tackle online piracy.

Search: In 2013 we removed 222 million web pages from Google Search due to copyright infringement. The average take-down time is now just six hours. And we downgrade websites that regularly violate copyright in our search rankings.
Video: We’ve invested tens of millions of dollars in innovative technology — called ContentID — to tackle piracy on YouTube.

Google is also an industry leader in combating child sexual abuse imagery online. We use hashing technology to remove illegal imagery from all our products and from the search index. We have safe modes for both Search and YouTube that filter out inappropriate content. And we are committed to protecting our users’ security. It’s why we remove malware from our search results and other products, and protect more than 1 billion users every day from phishing and malware with our Safe Browsing warnings.

It’s an incredibly reasoned letter from Google which you can read in full here.


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