Of course Google’s fine with running cloud services for known pirates


The content’s ours, but that URL isn’t—and thanks to Google they’re still online
 
A Chinese gambling site has cloned entire chunks of Lucire’s website. It’s not the first time this has happened with a bad actor behind the Bamboo Curtain; some years ago I had to ask a friend from Wuhan to intervene to see if we could get the pages removed, since the standard procedure of asserting your copyright doesn’t go down properly in the People’s Republic of China.

The latest mob has two websites that Google quite happily shows. When I try to track down the host, it’s Google. I filed DMCA reports with them, but their excuse is that it isn’t up to them, since they’re merely a cloud provider. They refuse to tell me who the hosting company is, and merely wrote this:

Hello,
 
Please note that Google is acting here as a cloud services platform, and not a creator or owner of the content. Our customers, or their customers, may create content that is hosted on our cloud services platform, but we don’t make any claims about the content.

The best way to resolve your dispute is directly with the webmasters, content creators, and/or other owners of the content.

Please reach out directly to: [email protected]
 
Regards,
 
The Google Team

You’d have to be very naïve and not know much about the internet to think this was a serious reply.

Here’s a bad actor breaking the law and you think that writing to them is going to solve it?

You offer DMCA forms and you fail to enforce them?

Evidently Google has very, very little clue on what the standard procedure in the US is.

So if you are a pirate, remember to get your hosting through GoDaddy and your cloud services through Google and they will both run interference against the legitimate owner and protect you.

My reply to Google on March 23 was:

Is Sigmatic the web host for this content? We really need to contact the hosts if Google is unwilling to stop disseminating this content via its cloud.

I doubt the site owner will respond given that they are already breaking the law.

There has been no response, naturally. I expected as much.

I’ll have to start filing other forms with Google to at least get these bad actors off the index, if they refuse to inform me who is hosting the cloned sites.

If anyone needed proof that Google supports bad actors, including misinformation sites, then look no further. Here they are actively aiding a pirate, a law-breaker. Because I have informed them of the original website and code, they are now knowingly doing this.

If you go from the early days of Google advertising and the foreseeable outcome that funding malicious sites (viz. by not checking who could host Google ads) would result in more malicious sites, then this is entirely in keeping with the company and its negligence. There are other reports that when Google is alerted to bad actors, it does nothing.

We have Google funding and protecting the guilty, we have Facebook a party to genocide, and we have Twitter a forum for fascism, and yet we continue to let them operate on our shores without consequences. No wonder the likes of Peter Thiel came here. He knows that, National or Labour, we’re a soft touch.


You may also like




Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *