Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Megaupload Data Could be Deleted Starting Thursday

First off today, according to government sources, Megaupload’s data, including the files of its millions of users, could be deleted by Thursday. The move comes as the government says that it is done accessing the data that formerly made up Megaupload’s site and the contractors that were helping host the site can not be paid as the company’s assets are frozen. As such, they’ve asked permission to delete the data to make room for other customers. However, Megaupload’s attorney is hoping to find a way both use the files in Megaupload’s defense and to make the files available again to the users who uploaded them, so they won’t be lost forever.

2: Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Censorship

Next up today, in the UK, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport gave a proposal to the major search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo to ask them to de-rank or remove search results for sites that routinely infringe copyright and to bolster the ranking of legitimate sites. According to the proposal, such an effort would already be in line with their existing policies on favoring sites meet certain quality standards. Critics of the proposal, however, are calling this a form of search engine censorship. However, the proposal is non-binding at this time and is merely a suggested set of guidelines for the search engines to follow.

3: Triple Town developer Files Copyright Infringement Suit Over Yeti Town

Finally today, the gaming company Spry Fox has filed a copyright infringement suit against competing game maker 6Waves LOLAPPS over a case of alleged plagiarism. According to Spry Fox, they were in talks with 6Waves LOLAPPS to have the latter publish a game created by Spy Fox named “Triple Town”, which was already a popular Facebook game. However, according to Spry Fox, 6Waves LOLAPPS took the opportunity to develop a clone of the game named “Yeti Town” and then publish it to the iOS App Store, beating Spry Fox to that market. Finally, also according to Spry Fox, 6Waves LOLAPPS sent a message via Facebook to break off negotiations about Triple Town the day Yeti Town was published.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

With a search engine marketshare of less than 10%, Yahoo! is already largely seen as irrelevant when it comes to general search, especially since it began outsourcing its search results to Bing!

However, there is at least one area where Yahoo! has remained a critical player: Plagiarism detection.

Simply put, many of the most popular plagiarism detection services take advantage of Yahoo! Search Boss API (Application Programming Interface), which has made creating a plagiarism detection service both affordable and relatively simple.

So, as Yahoo!’s future hangs into balance, so does the future and capability of many of the Web’s best-known plagiarism detection services including Copyscape, Plagium, PlagScan and PlagAware, all of which use Yahoo! either exclusively or in part to find their results.

To be clear, there’s no immediate threat to Yahoo! BOSS and its closure has not even been mentioned. This is purely an academic exercise.

However, with such uncertain times ahead for Yahoo!, the question gets raised, what would a Yahoo!-less plagiarism detection landscape look like? The answer isn’t very clear.

Why Yahoo! is Important

Without using a search API of some sort, a plagiarism detection service would have to crawl websites and create its own index, a time-consuming and expensive process that would cause the services to be prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, most major search engines offer APIs that enable plagiarism checkers, as well as other services, to tap into their indexes for a relatively easily and cheaply.

Many plagiarism detection services began using Yahoo! BOSS over competing offerings for a simple reason: Cost.

Historically, Yahoo! BOSS was a free service. But, even after Yahoo! began to charge for the service (shortly after it began to use Bing for search results) the cost of using Yahoo! BOSS was still many times cheaper than using Google’s Search API.

This is why many of the best-known plagiarism detection services are built either in whole or in part on Yahoo! BOSS.

This cost is important because performing a single plagiarism check, usually, requires multiple API queries (the exact amount depends on how the service handles queries, the length of the work involved and other factors). As such, these API costs often become a major expense for these services.

But more than just a cost issue, the presence of a competing API to Google also offers a different perspective. Being able to tap multiple indexes of the Web rather than just one has the potential to ensure the maximum number of results are returned, especially since the different indexes often catch different content.

In short, without the Yahoo! Boss API, we are likely looking at a much more expensive and more limited future for plagiarism detection.

What Does a Yahoo!-less Future Look Like?

If Yahoo! BOSS were to go away, the future is definitely a difficult one for many plagiarism detection services.

Some, such as Copyscape and Plagium, already mix results from multiple sources (Google/Yahoo! and Yahoo!/Bing respectively) and would likely just lose some of their fidelity in their results. Copyscape would, arguably, be in a better position than most as it began life using the Google API.

Others, such as PlagAware and PlagScan, both of which use (or seem to use) Yahoo! exclusively would be forced to write a completely new backend for their service. This could have a drastic impact on how they detect duplicate content and how effective they are (better or worse).

Higher-end services, like Attributor, which use their own index of the Web would be unaffected by any change or closure of Yahoo! BOSS and may even have their position strengthened.

All in all though, there would be a major shuffle ahead for plagiarism detection services as they looked to fill the void left by Yahoo! BOSS.

Where Would the Refugees Go?

Those who depend on Yahoo! BOSS, if they wanted to stay open, would have a tough choice ahead of them as there are only two (major) providers who would remain.

1. Google: Google’s API is definitely robust, as is Google’s index, but is also much more expensive than Yahoo! BOSS.
2. Bing: Bing’s API is much less established and not as well regarded as Google’s but it is free for unlimited queries, just as Yahoo! BOSS was. However, the API’s TOU may pose challenges in some cases, specifically related to advertising requirements.

In short, for developers it’s a choice between an established and robust API that is more expensive and a newer one that comes with limitations on how the results can be used.

Most would likely go with Bing as it is the most natural replacement (especially since Yahoo! results come from Bing) but it remains to be seen if Bing’s results can compare with Yahoo! or Google’s for this purpose.

That would be something very interesting to test in the future.

Bottom Line

To reiterate the good news, there’s no immediate threat to Yahoo! BOSS at this time so all of the above is merely hypothetical. There has been no talk of closing Yahoo! BOSS and, given that it currently is a revenue generator for Yahoo!, it isn’t likely to be first on the chopping block.

That being said, the turmoil at Yahoo should give cause for concern to those who rely on the Yahoo! BOSS and the time may well be now to start looking at alternatives.

After all, if the end of Yahoo! BOSS does come, it will likely be sudden and it may be difficult for companies that rely on it to quickly reconfigure their products.

Even if it seems unnecessary at this time, preparing for the possibility may be the best move these services can make.

The story, which originally broke on Search Engine Land, has since gartered public responses from both Google and Microsoft, the owners of Bing.

The results have been a pretty ugly back and forth between the two companies, one that has ended with both sides accusing the others of being unethical and/or dishonest and a lot of negative press hurled at Microsoft.

So what is really going on? It’s not a simple question to answer, partly because we only have a brief glimpse of what either side is doing or has done behind the scenes. The most we can try to do is make heads or tails of it and see what it means both legally and ethically for the two companies.

What Happened: Does Bing Copy Google?

According to Google, after some recent relevancy updates to Bing, they began to notice a startling similarity between their results and Bing’s, especially on extremely unusual keyword results such “torsoraphy”, which is a misspelling for “tarsorrhaphy”, a rare surgery on the eyelids. According to Google, Bing wouldn’t correct the spelling, but would know to direct people to the same first result as Google.

This, in turn, prompted Google to run a “sting” operation where they manipulated the results of one hundred random, nonsensical search terms, such as “hiybbprqag”, to add random pages to the top of the results. Google then sent 20 of its engineers home with new Windows 8 laptops and had them perform test queries on Google from home in Internet Explorer 8 with Suggested Sites, a feature in IE8 that tracks user browsing to recommend related websites, and the Bing Toolbar both enabled.

The result was that, in about eight of the searches, Bing’s results were changed to match Google’s, even though the pages chosen by Google didn’t make sense for the query.

This was enough to convince Google that something was afoot and the story started making the rounds.

Bing later responded saying that they don’t copy from Google directly but that they do use the anonymous click and surfing data from their users as one of over 1,000 points of data to determine results. They went on to say that Google’s experiment was a “click fraud” attack similar to what spammers do and was trying to manipulate Bing’s results on ultra-long tail keywords where it was most vulnerable.

This, in turn, has raised serious questions about Microsoft’s monitoring of user activity, which seemingly wasn’t widespread knowledge before this incident. Google has said that it doesn’t use data from Chrome or its Google Bar to build its search results, other than possibly tracking site loading times, but Microsoft pointed to Android’s privacy policy, that Microsoft claims signals Google may be doing as such with their mobile operating system.

But all of this brings us back to our original question: Is Bing plagiarizing from Google?

No Easy Answers

As I read through the various points/counterpoints while researching this article, there were three facts that seemed to be largely overlooked:

1. Google’s Honeypot Worked Less Than 10% of the Time: Google attempted the honeypot with some 100 keywords but only 7-9 actually worked. That means that, in over 90 cases, it didn’t work.
2. The Keywords Involved Were Extreme Long Tail: They keywords in the honeypot were ones that showed no results or no relevant results. They keywords that aroused suspicion were primarily typos of strange, rarely-used words. Major searches, it seems, are unaffected by this as there is a lot of variance.
3. Engineers Had to Take Active Action: The engineers in the test didn’t simply alter Google’s results and wait for Bing to scrape them, they loaded up laptops, enabled tracking, performed the searches and clicked the desired result.

Clearly, this isn’t a case of Bing scraping Google’s results (which is what Scroogle does by design and with attribution). Instead, it’s a case of Bing’s underlying technology giving weight to actions by Microsoft IE users who visit Google. In short, what most seem to agree happened is:

1. Users submit surfing data via IE and the Bing toolbar.
2. Those users choose not to use Bing, use Google instead so Bing tracks those clicks.
3. On search terms where Bing has nothing or very little, those clicks sometimes get a lot of weight.

So, this brings us to the question I’ve been loathing: Is this plagiarism or otherwise unethical or illegal?

Legally, it seems dubious that Google’s search results could be considered copyrightable. Considering recently wire frame models based off of cars were deemed to lack sufficient creativity for copyrightability, it seems likely results generated solely by an algorithm, with no human involvement, would too. However, I wasn’t able to find a ruling directly aimed at this issue so, if anyone has one please send it my way.

Furthermore, Bing isn’t actually copying directly from Google, but looking at user data and drawing its own conclusions so, in the eyes of the law, it’s unlikely that there would be much in the way of a claim Google could make. It seems, largely, to be a matter between Microsoft and the users of its products.

That being said, the ethics are a much more complicated question.

Bing, when it set about introducing clicktracking as a factor in its search results, had to know that many of those it tracked would use Google and, therefore, it seems logical they knew that they would be getting information about Google results and they did nothing to prevent that. However, I’m not completely sure they should have.

For one, you can learn from your competitor’s results and product without copying it. By tracking clicks, Bing might be able to see that some sites that rank well in Google aren’t worth ranking well in their engine. This seems to be mostly what Bing does though as it was only non-competitive search terms that appears to be copied.

That being said, Bing, as Google’s main competitor, should be trying to create its own unique search experience, not merely trying to recreate Google’s with slightly better results. Though it may only be one factor that Bing considers, considering Google’s results for your own makes it look like you’re trying to build on Google’s back.

So is it unethical? I would consider it a gray area. At least as far as the relationship between Google and Bing goes, I don’t feel completely right giving Bing’s actions the OK, but I can’t outright condemn them either. Bing is walking a thin line here and a lot of what would determine their side on it depends on information we don’t have, such as exactly what information is collected and how it is used in Bing’s algorithm.

Sadly though, there are bigger questions to look at and, with those, even fewer good answers.

Bigger Questions

As important as the ethical and legal considerations are, there are other questions to ask, including:

1. How Aware Are Microsoft’s Users of the Tracking and It’s Use? Many seem to be surprised by what Microsoft is doing. How well was this use of private info disclosed and how clear was it made?
2. How Easy is it to Game Bing? Considering that the false Google results were irrelevant to their searches, it seems like “click fraud” as Microsoft calls it might be an easy way to game Bing, especially for long tail terms.
3. How, Exactly, is This Info Used? Though Microsoft makes it clear that it is just one of a thousand factors, it appears that click monitoring really has a sharp impact on the results. Exactly how much weight is this info given?

There aren’t any easy answers to these questions right now but I suspect we’ll hear more about the first one as this story spreads.

Bottom Line

The ethics of what Bing is doing (at least in regards to Google) are debatable and even I don’t have any solid answers, largely because this concept is still very new and the ethics haven’t been hashed out fully. However, there are bigger, probably more important questions being raised about Bing thanks to this revelation.

Though I don’t believe Bing is plagiarizing Google, at least not in the traditional sense of the word, Google may have exposed even greater mistakes an misdeeds of Bing by releasing the results of this test. In short, they make Bing look lazy, sloppy and easy-to-game, something that for a search engine may be even worse than being a plagiarist.

Clearly, this is a PR disaster for Bing and Microsoft, but I think the worst might be yet to come for them.

As I mentioned last week, the “Stopping Internet Plagiarism“, has been a cornerstone of the site since day one, explaining the ins and outs of fighting plagiarism and other misuse of your content, but it has also fallen into disrepair due to age and neglect.

Last week, I began the process of overhauling and repairing the damage. I fixed the main SIP page as well as the first three chapters. Today I’ve gone through and done the same for the last three, namely the Contacting the Host, When All Else Fails and The Long Haul pages.

In these chapters the changes were much more minor than in the first as there hasn’t been many significant changes in the law or technology in these areas. Instead, most of the changes were to the formatting, grammar and for clarification.

As with the first round, I wouldn’t call these updates a complete rewrite, most of the original text is still there, even more so in this case.

The changes included in this update are:

1. Updated the Contacting the Host page to better integrate in the stock letters.
2. Removed the section about “Causing a Ruckus” from the “If All Else Fails” as it is no longer a policy I agree with.
3. Updated search engine statistics and links in the “If All Else Fails” page.
4. Added information about Zoho Creator to the “The Long Haul” page.
5. Edited for styling and added images to every page.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts of suggestions for this section as these pages are easily among the most popular on the site and I want to make sure they are some of the best Plagiarism Today has to offer.

Sometime soon, I plan on doing the same to the Your Copyrights Online section but I have no definite timetable now. I’ll post more information as I come up with a more firm plan.

1: Google to Face Copyright Lawsuit By Visual Artists

First off today, Google will soon have to face yet another challenge over its book search offering. The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) as well as other visual artists are preparing to sue Google for the use of copyrighted images in the book search product. This comes after Google and the Author’s Guild have been working on a settlement in a similar lawsuit involving the text of the books that are included. That settlement is meeting with stiff opposition from competitors and the Justice Department alike.

2: Murdoch Tells Old Media to ‘Stand Up’ to Google, Bing

Next up today, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Wall Street Journal as well as many other papers across the globe, is trying to rally “old media” to make a stand against search engines, which he accuses of building a business on the back of their content without renumeration. He announced a plan to put all of his sites behind a paywall and hinted at plans to block Google and has done so with some of his papers already, though not the WSJ at this time.

3: Film Pirater Dies of Drug Overdose

Finally today, Gérémi Adam, a Montreal man who was the first Canadian to be jailed for pirating movies, died a week after his release due to a suspected overdose. According to his girlfriend, with whom he was living, Adam had become addicted to morphine while in prison and had used it since his release, possibly leading to his death. Adam served one week in prison on the piracy charge since, at the time of his sentencing, he was already in prison an unrelated charge.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

With the launch of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, there has been a lot of talk about which site produces the best results. Though Google is far and away the king in terms of popularity, Yahoo! still holds onto sizeable minority and, with Microsoft’s new offering, there is a promise of a three-way horse race.

But for readers of this site, one of the critical questions when choosing a search engine is which does the best job of finding duplicated content? Whether one is looking to verify that a work is original or track down plagiarism of their own work, this is an important question.

So I decided to take the three search engines and put them head to head in what I am calling the “5 Round Search Engine Deathmatch”. The goal is to find which search engine performs the best and detecting plagiarism and, if possible, find the strengths and weaknesses of the three.

Without any further ado, here is how it went down.

The Test

The goal of the test is not to be exhaustive, but to provide a quick overview of the various capabilities of the three search engines in this area. To do that, I chose five different works and ran unique phrases of those works through the search engines.

The first two works were poems of mine that had seen widespread reuse but had limited enough copying to be useful. The next two were two prose works, both with very limited reuse. The last was the Declaration of Independence, to see how many matches the search engines reported for that.

With each set of results, I went through by hand and counted the number of clear duplicate entries (matches where it was the same content, but at a different URL) and created a new total. The results of the five rounds are below.

Round 1

For this round a poem with widespread copying was used.

The first test was a big win for Yahoo!. It not only found more results initially but also had fewer duplicates. Cast both a more broad and a more fine-tuned net. However, Google’s results were still respectable, catching most of the worst infringement despite having barely half of Yahoo!’s results.

Bing, on the other hand, brings up the rear. With barely a fifth of Yahoo!’s and a third of Google’s results, it didn’t perform up to any standard.

Round Winner: Yahoo for both better detection and better duplicate filtering,

Round 2

For this round, another widely-copied poem was used.

In this round Google turned the tables, doubling Yahoo!’s efforts. It found 80 non-duplicate results to Yahoo!’s 40. However, both had comparable duplicate filtering, both with approximately 7% duplicates. Not a bad percentage.

Bing, on the other hand, only found four results, just 5% of Google’s results and 10% of Yahoo!’s. It also had a much higher duplication problem with 33% of its results being duplicates.

Round Winner: Google. Though and Yahoo! had identical duplication filtering, Google produced twice the results.

Round 3

For this round, a prose piece with limited reuse was used.

Google has another solid round, with 6 copies found and no duplicates. Yahoo!, on the other hand, only found four sites and one was a repeat. This is a clear case of Google finding more copies of a work, three to be specific.

Bing, on the other hand, found nothing. It didn’t even find the original site, which would have been good for one point. In short, Bing flat out failed in this test.

Round Winner: Google for both finding more matches and providing more accurate results.

Round 4

For this round, a prose work with a modest amount of known copying was used.

The results of this test were interesting. Google picked up the most results but its initial find of 27 results was complicated by an enromous duplication issue. A full 22 of the results were obvious duplicates, including over a dozen results pertaining to the same forum posting. This pushed the real infringements to the last page of the results.

Yahoo! and Bing both found two results, both on my site. One, in both cases, was a duplicate.

Round Winner: No one. I thought long and hard about this one and have decided that no one deserves to win this round. Google found infringements but the results were so buried as to be useless. Yahoo! and Bing failed to find anything.

Round 5

For this round, a line from the opening of the Declaration of Independence was used.

171700

For these results, due to their length, I am forced to take the search engine estimations at face value. However, I am having a very hard time believing Bing’s Results.

This would indicate that Bing, the out and out loser up until now, somehow found some 28x more results than Google and Yahoo! combined. This seems outrageous on multiple fronts and likely points to a flaw in Bing’s URL counting system (Note: Neither Yahoo! or Google have extremely reliable systems but I was able to hand check the results up to this point.)

As such, I am tossing Bing’s results for this round. Of the two that are within the realm of possibility, Yahoo has a definite edge with nearly double the results. Still, I don’t put too much stock in this test due to the unreliable nature of search engine self-reporting.

Round Winner: Yahoo found more results and takes the test, though this really is not a definitive test, even less of one than the others.

Final Results

Of the four rounds that had winners, Yahoo! and Google split them 2-to-2. However, Yahoo!’s victory in the last round is both less compelling and of less use to most copyright holders than the other rounds so I have to declare Google, by a hair, the overall winner in this deathmatch.

But while this probably will not soothe the debate about Yahoo! vs. Google, it does indicate one thing very clearly, for the purpose of plagiarism detection, Bing is a wash. Not only did bing place or tie for last in every test (save the dubious results in the fifth one) it failed to detect any copies of the content in one.

To make matters even worse, Bing also makes it very difficult to filter our duplicate entries. Where Yahoo! and Google both attempt (somewhat unsuccessfully) to group likely duplicates together, Bing, it seems, does not. In many cases duplicate pages were spread across multiple pages rather than being indented under the original or clustered together.

Whether or not you make Bing your search engine of choice is your decision, but it probably should not be your search engine of choice for finding copies of your content.

Bottom Line

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Don’t rely on any one search engine for your plagiarism detection. Both Yahoo! and Google found results the other missed. It is that simple.

However, if we’ve learned anything from this test it is that Bing, at least right now, is not ready to be relied on for plagiarism/copy detection. Whether one thinks its regular search results are solid or not, its phrase search results, the ones used to detect this kind of copying, are very weak.

This may be a bit unfair in that both Yahoo! and Google are established search players while Bing is just a preview release. However, since Live.com search results are already being forwarded on and users of IE6 are having it forced on them as their default search engine, it seems fair enough to put it to the test.

Right now, Bing is not up to this challenge though my hope is that, as they work on the search engine and improve it, that they may grow to become a viable third competitor.

1: Salinger sues over “Catcher in the Rye” sequel

First off today, author J.D. Salinger, who penned the famous book “Catcher in the Rye”, has filed suit against both the publisher and the author of an unofficial sequel to his novel entitled, “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye” written by someone under the name. “J.D. California”.

The suit seeks to block publication of the book, which was slated to be published later this year by Swedish publisher Nicotext.

Whether Salinger’s work, which was first published in 1951, is in the public domain or not will depend on whether its copyright was renewed, which seems very likely. If that is the case, copyright in the work should expire in 2046.

2: Microsoft’s Bing playing fast and loose with fair use?

Bing has been causing quite a stir these past few days but some of it appears to be a copyright controversy.

Bing, as part of its search engine shows previews, or thumbnails of videos that, when a user hovers their mouse over the image, the thumbnail both shows the video and, in some cases, plays the audio.

All-around great attorney and awesome person Denise Howell has asked whether this may be playing “fast and loose” with fair use as it takes the Perfect 10 ruling, which found that thumbnails of images were a fair use when used as part of search engines, and changes several of the factors to be less favorable toward Bing.

It’s a difficult question but she definitely has a point. We won’t know until someone takes the time to sue Microsoft over this. Which, if history is any indication, Perfect 10 is already drafting the papers (joke).

3: Cert Watch: Costco Wholesale Corporation v. Omega, S.A.

Finally today, we have a small dose of copyright fail, though I am not sure where to place the fail just yet.

Costco has found itself in a lawsuit filed by the manufacturers of a set of watches, Omega. The company manufactures watches overseas and, via authorized dealers, imports them into the U.S. Costco was able to take advantage of this to sell the watches at a lower price. Omega, unhappy with this, engraves its watches with a small emblem and, when Costco repeats the process, Omega sues for illegal importation of copyrighted goods.

This might seem to the copyright scholars to be a clear cut case of first sale, but that apparently doesn’t imply in this case as first sale only applies to works made within the U.S., at least according to the 9th Circuit. However, that creates a series of problems with copyright law, which Costco highlights in its reply.

The biggest is that it encourages companies to move manufacturing and the creation of copyrighted works overseas, and could be used to, theoretically, crush services such as Netflix by just moving DVD printing to another country.

So yeah, we have some copyright fail here, I’m just not sure on who’s part.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

When Microsoft announced Bing at the All Things Digital Conference last week and soft launched the preview of it yesterday, they were doing more than launching a new search engine, they were, according to many, finding a whole new direction for the company on the Web.

Though most seem to think that Bing is a vast improvement over Microsoft’s Live search, it seems the preview has not sufficiently wowed most to believe it better than Google. Still, when a major search provider revamps its offering, it causes many to take a fresh look.

Over the next few days, I’m going to be taking a closer look at Bing and what it may mean for content creators and copyright holders. Today, we’re going to take a look at Bing’s DMCA policy and how it stacks up against Google and Yahoo!

Bing’s DMCA Approach

Unsurprisingly, since Bing is owned by Microsoft, its approach to the DMCA is no different than it was on Live.com or other Microsoft sites. If you pull up Bing’s home page and look at the footer, you will see a “Legal” link.

On that page (which is still hosted on the live.com domain), under item 29 in their terms of use, you’ll find the “Notices and Procedure for Making Claims of Copyright Infringement” along with a link to this page that provides the necessary contact information as well as the information required for a correct notice.

Microsoft also has a filing with the U.S. Copyright Office (PDF), though the filing has not yet been updated to add the Bing name to it (this is not a shock as it takes months for the USCO to add a notice once it has been submitted).

Largely, the policy is the same one I reviewed in 2007, the only difference being that Microsoft is making it a bit easier to find the information by making the link clickable. It is a small change, but an important one in that it opens up the actual DMCA policy to the search engines.

Comparisons To Google/Yahoo!

The same as the Microsoft policy has not changed a great deal, neither has the Google’s or Yahoo!’s.

Yahoo! still has a very efficient and easy policy that provides a clear link at the footer of each page and a good explanation of the rules. Also, from personal experience, Yahoo! is very fast in dealing with infringements and is also very good about being fair to its customers and doing what it can to give them a chance to respond should the notice be erroneous.

Google, despite strides with its Blogger product, has made almost no changes to its search one. It still has the bizarre policy that forces copyright holders to fax or mail in a DMCA notice (unless one is willing to use my work around) . Google also submits all DMCA notices to Chilling Effects, something I support, so they are available (minus private information) for public viewing.

In the end, Yahoo! still has the best policy in terms of clarity and efficiency but Microsoft has made subtle changes to make it less obstructionist and at least comparable. Google still is clinging on to an outdated policy that is both hindering the filing of notices and making Chilling Effect’s work more difficult.

Unfortunately, I have not had a reason to file with Microsoft for some time so I am unaware if they are still having an issue with notices disappearing.

Bottom Line

Bing may be a new search engine, but its DMCA policy is the same as the last one. Microsoft hasn’t even bothered to move its TOS information to the Bing.com domain.

Fortunately, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Microsoft’s policy, though never particularly great, has always met the minimum requirements. They’ve done their part and, despite some filing issues over the years, they do seem to respond to notices eventually.

The question now is when and if Bing will become big enough to warrant it becoming a major target for takedown notices. Currently, many people ignore Live.com and even Yahoo! in favor of just filing notices with Google to save both time and money.

I don’t know what the magical threshold is on this matter, but it appears that, for most, that it hasn’t been met yet.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at how useful Bing is for detecting plagiarism and we’ll see if it is capable of matching Google or Yahoo in terms of returning valid results when searching for duplicated content.