Norwinter Studios

Something weird happened to me this morning. I saw this article in my RSS feed:

Slashdot Story | Google Expunges Pirate Bay From Search Results

Barence writes “According to PC Pro, Google has removed all search result links to The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing site. The move is a reaction to a takedown notice issued under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), although it’s unclear who filed the complaint. The ban isn’t particularly effective: The top result is now The Pirate Bay’s Wikipedia entry, which provides a prominent link to the site’s homepage. It’s also possible to search The Pirate Bay itself using Google’s site search.”

But when I tried to go read it I got the following error message:

The item you’re trying to view either does not exist, or is not viewable to you.

Weird. There’s not even a Google cache for it. I hope the article comes back alive later.

Update 1: Some people over at Slashdot noticed too and provided a link to an updated version of the real story on Cnet. Looks like Google reacted incorrectly to a DMCA takedown request, and Google has since added The Pirate Bay back in to their index.

The prompt reindexing may have been helped by a letter sent by Peter Sunde:

Peter Sunde-Kolmisoppi told Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagblated that The Pirate Bay’s attorney sent a letter to both Google and the companies that are suspected of being behind the allegations and demanded that the Pirate Bay be returned to Google’s index. The Pirate Bay accused Google of censoring a competitor and of stifling free expression, the paper reported.

The whole thing is a little curious when you think about it since Google lists plenty of torrent files without actually hosting any content, just like The Pirate Bay. It would have been a funny case of the pot calling the kettle black hadn’t it just been a mistake.

siker News Google, Pirate Bay, SlashDot

Trade organizations RIAA and MPAA are used to getting what they want politically. In Sweden they have had good success too, most recently getting the right judge for the job at the Pirate Bay trial. But is their political maneuvering backfiring in Sweden? The raid on the Pirate Bay lead to public demonstrations by upset Swedes. And now it appears the Pirate Bay trial has fed the opposition: the Swedish Pirate Party has doubled in size in less than a week.

Using this member count history tool at the Pirate Party’s homepage I sampled the member count at 18:00 for each day for the last month.

Pirate Party Growth between 2009-03-23 and 2009-04-24.

The day before the guilty verdict for The Pirate Bay the party grew by only 68 members. Then on the day, the 17th of April, 2824 new members joined up. At the time of this writing the party has grown by 150%, now eclipsing several smaller Swedish parties in member count, as seen in the following chart from the Pirate Party’s website:

Pirate Party Member Count Compared to other Swedish Parties

We’ll see soon if these members are bringing real votes with them. First up is the election for EU parliament on the 7th of June. RIAA and MPAA may find they won a pyrrhus victory if awareness of their heavy handed behavior has started to spread.

Raw CSV data

siker News MPAA, Pirate Party, RIAA