Hello,
I occasionally submit takedown requests to various hosting services for blogs, videos, file locker services, plus various and sundry social media sites. Often for copyright or trademark infringements, but also for circumvention tools (software piracy).
Unlike other services, which have some kind of human interaction, Google seems to rely far more heavily on automation than, say, Facebook or Twitter, and the process for dealing with piracy blogs and videos is opaque, at best. On Blogger, they usually just remove existing posts, and the pirate is back the next day posting the same content again. It is pretty frustrating to see someone stealing your work; monetizing the theft with advertisements, and even soliciting tips (PayPal, Bitcoin, etc.).
I know it is not possible to stop piracy. Large companies like Adobe and Microsoft certainly have not, and at a small company like the one I work at, there’s a finite amount of time we can spend fighting it. In our industry, we’re a small player, with plenty of competition from much larger companies, including at least half-a-dozen who offer free products. Time we spend dealing with piracy is time we don’t spend making better products.
It may be naive or old fashioned of me, but I expect people to pay me for my work, just as I pay them for theirs. And if you are unable (or unwilling) to pay for our software, well, go use one of our competitors’ free products. It’s not like we’re a sole source supplier.
Getting back to the issue at hand (Google), though, if Google wants to offer services which people can use to post stolen celebrity nudes or to pirate another company’s software, I think that Google has an obligation to make it just as easy as take down illegal content as it was to upload it in the first place. If a organization or company that’s making the requests abuses the process, then they lose the privilege to make them.
Now, images of naked celebrities are a bit different than software piracy, and while I would imagine that a lot of those images have been cropped, resized, watermarked, etc, a lot of them have not, and it should be able to identify them programmatically (via hashes, EXIF metadata and so forth). There may be hashing algorithms specific to image processing that allow for matching even when an image has been modified (not my area of expertise).
Google likes to make impressive-sounding noises about their ability to do things at scale with large amounts of computers, but they seem to be awfully quiet when it comes to handling these kinds of issues.
If we’re going for wishful thinking, well, if someone’s made any money from Google AdWords, that the money should be reverted back to Google (they can donate it to Google.Org, the EFF or even the Chilling Effects project). Repeat offenders lose the ability to make money through Google, or even have a Google account of any kind. Otherwise, they’ll just be back the next day uploading stolen pics or software and getting paid for it. Removing the profit motivation could help a little bit.
