Bing shows results that MS asked Google to take down

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120524/18190719071/odd-that-microsoft-demands-google-take-down-links-that-remain-bing.shtml

by sendtopms • 14 years ago

211 69 14 years ago

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mikeryan• 14 years ago

You know this is one of those things that sounds terribly hypocritical but in a massive company can easily be just the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Its hard for me to see this as anything more then typical large co bureaucracy.

ajross3• 14 years ago

My intuition agrees too, this is just a goof. But it's important to note that this isn't merely hypocrisy. By offering useful search results that Google doesn't, Microsoft makes Bing a more attractive search engine. This process certainly could be abused if MS wanted -- XBox and Windows cracks are clearly desired content.

kenrikm3• 14 years ago

It seems (in this case) that Microsoft makes the best search engine to steal from.. Microsoft. Bravo guys! Well done keep up the good work in Redmond.

grhino• 14 years ago

Or Bing doesn't even fall on Microsoft Entertainment's radar. I would expect the fiefdoms to defend their own turf.

latch• 14 years ago

I'm not following...there aren't 2 parties. There's 1 party, the people sending a take down notice. The question is why aren't they sending the same take down notices to all search engines which have the material in question?

myko• 14 years ago

Maybe they have and Bing just prioritizes requests differently?

This is interesting though, when I saw the headline about Microsoft making so many takedown requests to Google I assumed the items to be taken down were found by the Bing team, but it seems that isn't the case.

smackfu• 14 years ago

The 2nd party is the team at the search engine that has to take the link down. Maybe Google processes the notices more efficiently. Or maybe Bing prioritizes non-MS takedowns, because they are at greater risk of suit from them.

corin_• 14 years ago

Quite possibly for the same reason that many, if not most (? I've no idea, really, but certainly plenty of), SEO companies consider Google to be the only actual target, because Bing just isn't popular enough to spend the time on.

If there was a search engine out there that had 10 uniques per month would you expect people to care enough to send take-down notices to them? So where do you draw the line... for some people, you draw it between Google and Bing, not below them both.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Well it points out that Microsoft's internal processes are not well run. Presumably if Microsoft ever chose to sue Google over those contested links it would be a reasonable defense on Google's part that they were doing better than Microsoft's own search engine in complying. If you read Eric Goldman's excellent blog on the topic you can see that to keep your safe harbor status you have to be credibly trying to comply with requests. Being 'better' (as in more compliant) than Microsoft's own search engine would seem to be pretty good affirmative defense.

recoiledsnake3• 14 years ago

>Presumably if Microsoft ever chose to sue Google over those contested links it would be a reasonable defense on Google's part that they were doing better than Microsoft's own search engine in complying. If you read Eric Goldman's excellent blog on the topic you can see that to keep your safe harbor status you have to be credibly trying to comply with requests

You're assuming that their law firm sent Bing the takedown request of which there is no evidence. Also, they're completely within their rights to host links of which they own copyright on their own search engine.

Tichy• 14 years ago

Although it seems weird that they would have different groups for "remove stuff from Google" and "remove stuff from Bing". Why wouldn't they simply have a group for "remove stuff from search engines"?

calbear81• 14 years ago

I don't even think it was Bing who asked for those links to be removed, it was actually the X-Box division trying to prevent piracy of games on their platform. If anything, Bing probably is much slower and less adept at being able to block these results when compared to Google hence the discrepancy.

jcoder4• 14 years ago

Anyone else surprised that the use of "bitch" as a verb is suddenly acceptable journalism?

tankbot• 14 years ago

Premature optimization.

First there's the matter of whether or not TechDirt is "journalism." I'm not saying that to be snarky, just pointing out there's still a lot of debate surrounding this issue.

Zirro3• 14 years ago

I don't think TechDirt aims to be "on par" with the traditional newspapers when it comes to "controversial" language ;)

jcoder4• 14 years ago

Fuck, I don't give two shits about "controversial" language--but overtly, aggressively sexist language? Fuck that.

barik• 14 years ago

I've gotten several of these types of notices before. Usually, it isn't Microsoft that does them directly ("Internet1@microsoft-antipiracy.com"). For instance, the ones I've received as usually signed as "on behalf of Microsoft Corporation" with some third-party legal firm blindly handing these out.

So the fact that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing is probably quite accurate in this case.

wastedbrains• 14 years ago

wow that is some interesting corporate issues... Look our search engine is better it has so many more results... Which we believe to be illegal links and won't let any other search engines help you find... Bing, the best for your warez needs.

lmm2• 14 years ago

Or maybe this company that sent the takedowns, Marketly (not MS, just someone with whom they have a contract), never sent takedowns to Bing. (Why is of course open to speculation; maybe Bing isn't popular enough to be worth the effort)

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

That still leaves Microsoft in a position where they pay others to send takedown notices to their competitor for the stuff they don't bother to take down themselves. You'd think they'd do that for themselves, too, if they thought those links are so horrible for their own business. My guess is they just want to mess with Google and waste their time on money chasing hundreds of thousands of links a month.

lmm2• 14 years ago

Man, you need to pay more attention to Hanlon's Razor. What's actually happened is Microsoft's xbox division has paid this company to do something about xbox piracy. And this company has sent takedowns (legitimate, I might add) to google, not out of some dastardly plan to waste google's time, but to try and make it harder to find pirated xbox games. The juiciest angle supported by the facts is "third-party Microsoft supplier thinks google more useful than bing", and while that's not exactly flattering to microsoft, it tells us nothing we didn't already know.

ktizo2• 14 years ago

I am loving the takedown notice for the takedown notice.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...

Perhaps this is the solution to the entire problem, trap the whole system in a recursive loop. Although then perhaps all the telephones in the world will ring until Douglas Hofstadter answers one of them.

raldi• 14 years ago

Is that a reference to something? I'm imagining Hofstadter telling fans to call a number at random, and ask the person who answers to call another number at random and repeat the request to whoever answers, with the end result being that Hofstadter's phone would ring and you could talk to him. That sounds like something he'd do, but I can't find a mention of it on Google.

ktizo2• 14 years ago

End of lawnmower man.

[edit] but with Douglas Hofstadter. And a kitten. But the kitten is just out of shot, so we can't really see it.

josefresco• 14 years ago

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe MS is okay with Bing returning results, even pirate results that Google does not.

Maybe MS agrees with the Pirate mantra that piracy doesn't hurt, but help sales. What would happen if pirates, even casual pirates learned that Bing results weren't filtered but Google's were? I would suspect a massive uptake in usage if this was proven. And who are these pirates? They're the most geeky of your friends, the ones who influence and tutor the non-tech savvy about what tech products and services to use (Bing, Windows, Office etc.)

Crazy? Probably. But still fun to consider. Too bad MS is too big, slow and traditional to do something this radical.

brudgers• 14 years ago

I see a different and more likely possibility. Microsoft has an interest in tracking usage patterns among those inclined toward pirating their software. If the pirates use Google, then they don't have access to that data, whereas they do with Bing. It's not as if Google is likely to share their information.

rbanffy2• 14 years ago

Protecting Microsoft's market share and its associated network effect is very important for them - if Windows' share falls below a certain level, writing Word documents, sending PowerPoint presentations, keeping your e-mail in Exchange and your workflows in SharePoint will make much less sense than it does today. As it happens, Microsoft products become less attractive and their share spirals toward an equilibrium point given by their cost/benefit ratio as compared to their competitors.

Even if they lose some sales to piracy, as long as network effect work to their advantage, it's worth to lose it to a free version of their product than to a competitor.

It's unsurprising if they turn a blind eye to piracy when they judge it benefits them.

Having said that, this looks a lot like incompetence, or a contractor that's being paid to issue takedown notices only to Google.

bobsy• 14 years ago

Its odd. Its either an over sight. Takedown lost in bureaucracy.

Or.. perhaps comically. This is a third party issueing takedowns on Microsofts behalf. Isn't submiting to Bing due to lack of market share?

mossplix• 14 years ago

Bing tracks everyone who clicks the links

nextstep• 14 years ago

Now, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that if Marketly is sending a takedown to Google to get such a link taken out of its search engine, on behalf of Microsoft, that it quite likely is issuing the same kind of takedown to Microsoft's Bing (hell, you'd perhaps think that Microsoft could just pull the link without a takedown).

I doubt that Microsoft is streamlined enough to allow different departments (Bing and whomever handles DMCAs) to effectively communicate. Microsoft is an immense bureaucracy.

merraksh• 14 years ago

If we were to ascribe this to malice, MS achieves two things. First, those search results won't be available at least on one of the main search engines, and this has the effect of cutting the number of illegal downloads. Second, MS has just gotten some traffic to Bing --- MS sure won't be happy to see all those requests for Xbox game torrents, but now it has a little more control on them.

cpeterso2• 14 years ago

Google send takedown requests to Bing for these same Microsoft links.

digitalman• 14 years ago

MS hires a third party to police these SERPs. The third party does't send notices to Bing because they'd be threatening their own client! It's that simple.

Anything more would require additional effort and initiative and coordination between the contracting team, the contractor, and the Bing team. Probably someone just hired the third party, turned them loose and didn't put any more thought into it.

ishansharma2• 14 years ago

But what are they trying to gain? Users? For me, if I do not find a result on Google, search is over. I never try Bing!

jitbit• 14 years ago

Oh, come one people.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor

A1kmm• 14 years ago

It seems surprising that Microsoft even owns copyright in the works that are claimed.

"Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction" is apparently a Ubisoft product, which is a publicly traded company distinct from Microsoft.

While they all appear to be Xbox 360 games, being a platform manufacturer doesn't usually mean you own the content produced for that platform. It is possible that the games linked against a Microsoft library, and are infringing against the Microsoft's rights in the library, but then the declaration needs to declare that "that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed" - which means that the allegation of what is being infringed (i.e. a library and not the entire work) should have matched the work Microsoft owned.

Bing shows results that MS asked Google to take down

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