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Google to Alter Search Results to Reflect a Site\'s History of Copyright Infringement

By AMY CHOZICK

The big media companies won a battle in the war to combat online piracy on Friday when Google said it would alter its search algorithms to favor Web sites that offer legitimate copyrighted movies, music and television.

Google said that beginning next week its search algorithms would take into account the number of valid copyright removal notices Web sites have received. Web sites with multiple, valid complaints about copyright infringement may appear lower in Google search results.

“This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily - whether it's a song previewed on NPR's music Web site, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify,” Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president of engineering wrote in a company blog post.

The entertainment industry, which has for years pressured Google to act against online piracy, applauded the move.

“We are optimisti c that Google's actions will help steer consumers to the myriad legitimate ways for them to access movies and TV shows online,” Michael O'Leary, a senior executive vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America, said in a statement.

Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, commended Google on the move. “Google has signaled a new willingness to value the rights of creators,” he said in a statement.

But the two men also expressed caution and urged Google to implement the change with the vigor it adopted in stamping down on pirated videos on YouTube.

“The devil is always in the details,” Mr. O'Leary said. While Mr. Sherman added, similarly, that changing the search algorithm “is not the only approach and of course, the details of implantation will matter.”

The announcement comes just over six months after an epic battle between big media companies and techno logy companies over a pair of bills designed to crack down on pirated online content particularly from rogue foreign Web sites.

In January media companies like Viacom, Time Warner and the Walt Disney Company backed SOPA and PIPA - short for Stop Online Piracy Act (the House bill) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (the Senate bill) - while Internet activists and companies like Google and Facebook, buoyed by a huge online grassroots movement, argued the bills would hinder Internet freedom. Wikipedia went black and millions of consumers signed online petitions to protest the bills, which quickly died.

That tension has decreased as media companies have regrouped with Silicon Valley executive over how to combat online piracy.

Google said it would not remove pages from copyright-infringing Web sites from its search engine unless it received a valid copyright removal notice from the rights' owner. “Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed,” Mr. Singhal said.

Google said it had received copyright removal requests for over 4.3 million U.R.L.'s in the last 30 days, according to the company's transparency report. That's more than it received the entire year of 2009.

Amy Chozick is The Times's corporate media reporter. Follow @amychozick on Twitter.



Time Magazine to Examine Plagiarism Accusation Against Zakaria

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Time magazine said on Friday afternoon that it was looking into accusations that Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host and Time editor at large, had plagiarized sections of his Aug. 20 column on gun control.

Some passages in Mr. Zakaria's column, “The Case for Gun Control,” closely tracked those in a longer article on guns in America by the historian Jill Lepore in the April 23 issue of The New Yorker. Earlier this year, Mr. Zakaria was criticized for giving a commencement speech at Harvard that was very similar to the one he had earlier given at Duke.

The similar text was spotted by the conservative Web site Newsbusters, and was sped up across the Internet via the media blog JimRomenesko.com.

Mr. Zakaria was out of the country and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Time spokeswoman said in a statement: “Time takes any accusation of plagiarism by any of our journalists very seriously, and we will carefully examine the facts before saying anything else on the matter.”



Tales of Frustration in Selling a House

By BUCKS EDITORS

The subject of Paul Sullivan's Wealth Matters column this week is a man, Bob Fisher, who is trying to sell his house himself after two brokers were unable to sell two other properties he owns.

Sure, Mr. Fisher is a wealthy man trying to sell a large estate on a mountaintop in Highlands, N.C., for at least $18 million. But even people trying to sell much simpler homes for significantly less share his frustration with the real estate market.

Mr. Fisher has tried some of the techniques that worked for him in the business world, reaching out to people he knows who could afford his house and might be interested in such an estate. He has also created a network of people connected to the wealthy - everyone from Realtors to hair dressers - and offered a $250,000 finder's fee to the person who refers the eventual buyer. Still, no luck.

Have you tried to sell your home yourself? What did you learn from the process? And wha t advice could you give to others?



Friday Reading: The Destination of Your Health Insurance Refund

By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD

A variety of consumer-focused articles appears daily in The New York Times and on our blogs. Each weekday morning, we gather them together here so you can quickly scan the news that could hit you in your wallet.



The Breakfast Meeting: Craiglist Relents on Owning Posts, and a Chatty Mars Rover

By NOAM COHEN

The online classified site Craigslist dropped a provision that asserted an exclusive license to users' posts just two weeks after implementing it, CNET reported. The effort was intended to fend off third parties trying to repurpose the site's listings, but a sympathetic note from the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained that after meeting with Craigslist, the company agreed to change its policy.

The group's statement reads, in part:

We understand that Craigslist faces real challenges in trying to preserve its character and does not want third parties to simply reuse its content in ways that are out of line with its user community's expectations and could be harmful to its users. Nevertheless, it was important for Craigslist to remove the provision because claiming an exclusive license to the user's posts - to the exclusion of everyone, including the original poster - would have harmed both innovation and u sers' rights, and would have set a terrible precedent.

Retail sales of new video game hardware, software and accessories fell for the eighth-straight month in July to $548.4 million, The Associated Press reported, citing a report by the research firm NPD group. Even with the anticipated introduction of Nintendo Wii U later in the year, the firm predicted full-year sales would be $14.5 billion, down from $17 billion last year.

Writing in the At War blog, Amalie Flynn describes the Google search terms that lead readers to her blog, Wife and War. It is a testament to how a search engine takes inchoate thoughts like “husband off to Afghanistan soon” or “who comes and tells you your husband died at war” or “I'm suffering because my husband is mean now back from war” and produces “results,” including Ms. Flynn's blog. In the post she imagines the wives typing in these queries alone, trusting that the computer can provide answers and support .

The will of Adam Yauch, one of the Beastie Boys, who died in May at age 47, instructs that his image, music and any art he created could not be used for advertising, the Web site DNAinfo.com reports.

The Curiosity rover that landed on Mars on Monday morning has a Twitter feed that already has nearly a million followers. For a serious scientific mission, the rover prefers to communicate in informal terms, throwing in an occasional “lol” for good measure.



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