RIAA surprised to discover Google wants paying in return for work

The RIAA and the IFPI - two entirely separate organisations, albeit run by the same cartel - has got in a bit of a huff as Google has asked them to pay for finding possibly unlicensed files on the internet:

The burden of finding the offending links has however always rested in the hands of the people who wish them taken down. Given what a time consuming process that has proven to be, the RIAA and the IFPI asked Google to “provide a means to help them track down pirated material more efficiently,” in the words of Cnet.

Google did not respond in the way they had hoped. Instead of offering to devote their own resources to help fight online piracy, Google directed them to their Web Search API option called Site Search, a product that charges $5 per 1000 executed searches. This in short told both the RIAA and the IFPI to do their own work, and to pay Google for using their products in their hunt to protect their content.

There's been some squawking that this is somehow "unfair", with an attempt to build some sort of logic that Google should do it for free because, erm, people might search for unlicensed files on Google and Google sells advertising and... you know, it's not fair.

Which is a bit like saying that Microsoft should chip for the costs of searching for files, because people use Windows to run a browser which they do the search on, so it's only fair, right?