While most everybody these days either uses a free streaming service of some sort or pays for their music by the track or album, it’s not terribly hard to find a number of people that get their music illegally. Whether the justification is that they wouldn’t have bought it anyway, they can’t afford to pay for it, or they’re only pirating music that they can’t legitimately buy in their country or that’s out of print, piracy is a big issue for the music industry and it does hurt artists and listeners alike. Unfortunately, one of the biggest enablers of internet music piracy right now is Google, and the issue is multifaceted and complex.
While the music industry has attacked YouTube in the past for not paying artists enough when they monetize content and even said that the DMCA is partly to blame, one of the bigger issues they have is the enabling of piracy through the service. Users can very easily circumvent Content ID if they so choose, and Google does not block videos that show how to do this. This means that any uploader with a mind to rake in cash from music that’s not theirs until somebody steps up and reports their video can do so. Likewise, even with videos that are properly accounted for and monetized, users can find multiple avenues to capture the sound from the video and put it on their music player of choice as if they had bought the album. This means that the per-play revenue from the video is now lost on that user, who will tend to listen to the song on-device more often than boot up the YouTube app and eat into their data plan. The fact that Google’s removal of piracy-related search links can logically only reach so far does not help matters.
In a recent paper, Google fired back, saying that they’ve paid out about $3 billion to the music industry, and, in essence, are doing their best to fight piracy. They go on to quote figures like the $60 million they’ve invested to help improve YouTube’s Content ID system as well as the roughly 3.5 billion daily searches they have to sift through the results of, and respond to takedown requests on in order to help squeeze out piracy-related results. The music industry, meanwhile, is still spending millions to fight piracy on all fronts. Google’s paper implies, basically, that they are doing their best and that further practical solutions should fall to anybody that takes issue with the results they’re achieving in their war on piracy.