Bing, Yahoo and Google collaborate on torrents crackdown in push for global law
Search rivals Bing, Yahoo and Google have buried the hatchet to combat a common enemy, torrents, by pulling resources to shutdown peer-to-peer download sites once and for all.
The joined-up approach follows years of piecemeal action against such providers and promises to make such platforms inaccessible to the vast majority of the public by rejigging their algorithms and processes.,
Executives of all three businesses are reported to have met entertainment industry bigwigs in the UK at the behest of the British Intellectual Property Office with a view to ban torrent aggregators.
So successful was the round table that agreement on a new code of practice is now expected ‘very soon’ according to baroness J.P. Buscombe, from the Digital Economy Bill committee, who confirmed: “Since the idea was last discussed in parliament, Intellectual Property Office officials have chaired a further round table meeting between search engines and representatives of the creative industries.”
Interestingly, the UK crackdown is being viewed as a test bed for a wider global move against such sites should the British push prove to be a success.
The UK has taken a lead on restricting access to copyrighted content with internet service providers ordered to restrict access to illegal file-sharing sites by the High Court.