Google’s Susan Wojcicki
Google’s Susan Wojcicki defended the search giant Thursday against the newest claims from the content industry that it has amassed a fortune partly on the back of pirated content, made the previous night by “superagent” Ari Emanuel at the D: All Things Digital conference.
“I think he was misinformed, very misinformed,” Wojcicki said, regarding comments made by Emanuel that since Google was capable of filtering child pornography out of YouTube, it could do the same for pirated content if it really wanted to. “We do not want to be building a business based on piracy.”
Child pornography is something that is easy to filter from a technical standpoint: you know it when you see it, Wojcicki said. Content, on the other hand, is more complicated because there can be multiple rights holders to a piece of content.
Google lets rights holders identify their content by submitting a copy through YouTube’s Content ID system, which scans YouTube for matches for that copy and lets rights holders decide if they want to run ads against that content or just remove it. It’s not clear whether Emanuel’s rant concerned YouTube or Google’s search results, but Google has tried a few things with search results in an attempt to balance between the concerns of copyright owners and its desire to index as much information as possible.
Image credit Asa Mathat | All Things Digital
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