Motion Picture Association Study Finds Search Engines Complicit In Piracy

A new study released today by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in the company of members of the United States Congress found that internet search engines play a key role in user access to copyright infringing content online. The copyright industry study will be used to make the case that search engine companies, such as Google, need to take more responsibility in deterring use of unauthorised content without compensation to the rightsholders.

The MPAA study and press release are available here [pdf].

[Update:] The Consumer Electronics Association has issued a challenge to the MPAA study, arguing that the problem is a lack of legal alternatives from the content industry. The CEA press release is here.

“The fact is that today, due to the Internet, artists can create, distribute, and monetize more content more easily than ever before,” Michael Petricone, senior vice president, government and regulatory affairs at CEA, said in the release. “Rather than assailing innovators, we urge the content community to work with the tech industry to provide new, exciting and authorized distribution platforms to consumers.” [end update]

According to MPAA, key findings of the study include:
“• Search engines play a significant role in introducing audiences to infringing movies and TV shows online. 74% of consumers surveyed cited using a search engine as a discovery or navigation tool in their initial viewing sessions on sites with infringing content.
• Audiences who view infringing TV or film content for the first time online are more than twice as likely to use a search engine in their navigation path as repeat visitors.
• The majority of search queries that lead to audiences viewing infringing film or TV content do not contain keywords that indicate a specific intent to find illegal content. 58% of queries that consumers use prior to viewing infringing content contain generic or title-specific keywords only, indicating that consumers who were not even seeking infringing content in the first place were directed there regardless.
• For the infringing film and TV content URLs measured, the largest share of search queries that lead to these URLs (82%) came from the largest search engine, Google.
• The share of referral traffic from Google to sites included in the Google Transparency Report remained flat in the three months following the implementation of Google’s “signal demotion” algorithm in August 2012.
• Overall, search engines influenced 20% of the sessions in which consumers accessed infringing TV or film content online between 2010 and 2012.”

MPAA said that 20 percent could represent over 4 billion referrals per year or 300 million per month, possibly billions of generic searches such as “watch movies” per year.

The film industry association and lawmakers so far stopped short of directly asserting legal liability on the part of search engines, however.