After years of catering to copyright holders and their increasing demands, is Google about to go rogue in sheer frustration? According to a report by TorrentFreak, 2017 could well be the year Google throws its toys out of the pram, raises the Jolly Roger and takes to the digital seas in anger by launching its very own mega torrent search engine.
Over the last decade the copyright industry has been baying for pirate blood and have badgered Google for far broader search engine censorship to curb the growing piracy problem. In 2012 alone, Google removed over 50 million pirate search results that were infringing on the copyright holders' content.
Google has an obligation to remove such content if they receive a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request from the copyright holders. Google then started publishing such takedown requests in its Transparency Report.
The search engine giant has also taken several measures targetting pirate sites, from removing the piracy-related terms to downranking such websites, at the behest of demands from the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America.
While Google has to remove all torrent sites form its search results, according to the report, it could also be releasing its own torrent meta-search engine.
The report speculates that this might just be the reason why Torrentz.eu founder was secretly put in charge of the project, some months ago. This also could explain why Torrentz.eu, a piracy behemoth, was suddenly shut down in August 2016, after 13 years in operation.
The report also added that Google has been working on the torrent search engine in beta form for over a decade and might launch the meta search engine in one form or the other this year.
