Piracy only hurts big corporations, so who cares? That’s how the saying goes, but then I don’t understand why so many corporation-hating “file sharers” insist upon giving Google free money, especially when Google is bigger than all the major Hollywood studios combined. The report conducted by Milward Brown Digital contains this observation in its executive summary:
58% of queries that consumers use prior to viewing infringing content contain generic or title-specific keywords only, indicating that consumers who may not explicitly intend to watch the content illegally ultimately do so online.
This is consistent with how search tends to work, providing users with unexpected paths that may or may not lead to opportunities for infringement, but are often not what one expects to find. So, the number 58% isn’t surprising at all. In fact, the report asserts that just over 19% of infringement can be traced to search and that 82% of that search belongs to Google. No kidding.
So, out of every hundred million clicks to infringing content, Google feeds almost sixteen million of them. No wonder they’re such a big corporation.
