You know this is one of those things that sounds terribly hypocritical but in a massive company can easily be just the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Its hard for me to see this as anything more then typical large co bureaucracy.
My intuition agrees too, this is just a goof. But it's important to note that this isn't merely hypocrisy. By offering useful search results that Google doesn't, Microsoft makes Bing a more attractive search engine. This process certainly could be abused if MS wanted -- XBox and Windows cracks are clearly desired content.
"Steal?" You drank the koolaid. The fact that they haven't rectified this in their own search engine should be pretty good evidence that copying and piracy are not, in fact, "theft" and that they don't represent lost sales.
>The fact that they haven't rectified this in their own search engine should be pretty good evidence that copying and piracy are not, in fact, "theft" and that they don't represent lost sales
If MS truly felt they were losing money, they'd shut down the links. Bing links are, for obvious reasons, much easier to shut down than Google links. But they didn't. You can do the rest of the computation.
If MS removed those links from Bing, then people might complain that MS is selectively altering search results for its own benefit. (I'm only half-joking.)
So why are they then contracting out the takedown notices to a third party which must be charging them a whole bunch for sending notices for hundreds of thousands of links? Just to make Bing better and Google worse for 0.01% of popular illegal downloads? Again, does not compute.
Well it points out that Microsoft's internal processes are not well run. Presumably if Microsoft ever chose to sue Google over those contested links it would be a reasonable defense on Google's part that they were doing better than Microsoft's own search engine in complying. If you read Eric Goldman's excellent blog on the topic you can see that to keep your safe harbor status you have to be credibly trying to comply with requests. Being 'better' (as in more compliant) than Microsoft's own search engine would seem to be pretty good affirmative defense.
>Presumably if Microsoft ever chose to sue Google over those contested links it would be a reasonable defense on Google's part that they were doing better than Microsoft's own search engine in complying. If you read Eric Goldman's excellent blog on the topic you can see that to keep your safe harbor status you have to be credibly trying to comply with requests
You're assuming that their law firm sent Bing the takedown request of which there is no evidence. Also, they're completely within their rights to host links of which they own copyright on their own search engine.
>to host links of which they own copyright on their own search engine //
They don't own a copyright on the torrentroom link (for example). There is no copyright in a regular URL¹.
They apparently own the content linked to. But then I own the content of my house that the road network is linked to and that doesn't mean the local government is party to people taking my stuff without asking.
Links may be made unlawful but they're not copyright infringements. IMO they're not even contributory.
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¹ It may be possible to craft a URL that has sufficient distinctiveness and artistic merit to acquire a copyright but I can't ever recall seeing one or hearing of one. A URL could be a trademark infringement of course.
Can you explain please? Do you mean like an image encoded in a URI? If so that's why I called it a "regular URL", so as not to be confused with a URI; to recapitulate I'm referring to a mere link to a resource and not the resource as contained in a link.
That's a valid point, although in the case of links pointing to 'cracked' versions of their tools or operating system it might look silly for Bing to continue to link to them.
I'm not following...there aren't 2 parties. There's 1 party, the people sending a take down notice. The question is why aren't they sending the same take down notices to all search engines which have the material in question?
Quite possibly for the same reason that many, if not most (? I've no idea, really, but certainly plenty of), SEO companies consider Google to be the only actual target, because Bing just isn't popular enough to spend the time on.
If there was a search engine out there that had 10 uniques per month would you expect people to care enough to send take-down notices to them? So where do you draw the line... for some people, you draw it between Google and Bing, not below them both.
Maybe they have and Bing just prioritizes requests differently?
This is interesting though, when I saw the headline about Microsoft making so many takedown requests to Google I assumed the items to be taken down were found by the Bing team, but it seems that isn't the case.
Maybe it is and the Bing team only uses Google to find the links. (lol) Actually didn't Microsoft force their employees to use only Microsoft products? Sometimes it's not fun to eat your own dogfood.
As far as I remember, it was them asking not to buy iPhone. Nothing more. They can't force their employees to use only Microsoft products. They'd be down in a day!
The 2nd party is the team at the search engine that has to take the link down. Maybe Google processes the notices more efficiently. Or maybe Bing prioritizes non-MS takedowns, because they are at greater risk of suit from them.
Although it seems weird that they would have different groups for "remove stuff from Google" and "remove stuff from Bing". Why wouldn't they simply have a group for "remove stuff from search engines"?
