by Zoe Samios, Sydney Morning Herald — August 27, 2020
Google Australia will now shut down ‘mirror’ or ‘proxy’ pirate sites as soon as they appear. These sites often emerge with a slightly tweaked domain after a pirate site has been removed from Search, allowing users to continue to access illegal content on the sites.
Graham Burke, Village Roadshow non-executive director and Creative Content Australia chairman explained to the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Site blocking was brought in by the government and was effective but there was massive leakage because while the government and site blocking shut the front door, the back door was still wide open and search engines were taking people to proxy and mirror sites.
“The pirates are taking advantage of the lag time between their criminal mirror site going up by changing one letter and us taking three or four weeks to go back through the court system.”
Mr Burke further explained to Content Cafe:
“The situation with Google can be likened to a Westfield Shopping Centre where the owners discover a shop that’s skimming customer credit card details. Of course Westfield would never accept that behaviour and would shut the tenant’s shop down. Similarly with Google, they don’t want criminal pirate enterprises operating through their search engine either.”
Read the full story here.