Google rejects music industry request to remove Pirate Bay homepage

The Pirate Bay has long been a thorn in the side of copyright holders, but when Britain’s record industry trade association asked Google to remove the notorious file-sharing site from its homepage, the search engine refused to comply.

The BPI, which comprises the big three record companies (Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Universal Music Group), hundreds of independents representing thousands of labels as well as associated manufactures and distributors, is every bit the stake holder in the anti-piracy crusade as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the US, albeit less well-known stateside.
Last week, the BPI sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice containing over 2,000 URLs which allegedly infringe the US law criminalizing production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works.

Google, however, refused to comply with the BPI’s request, making The Pirate Bay homepage the only URL in the entire notice where no proscriptive action was taken.
The catch is that while search results on The Pirate Bay provides links to hundreds of thousands of infringing titles, its own homepage in fact provides no links to pirated content.
This means that while The Pirate Bay’s search results pages may not show up in the Google index, the site’s homepage meets these standards, and should not be excluded.

source rt.com