BPI use 'right to be forgotten' to bang familiar drum

Oh, here's the BPI, taking the European 'right to be forgotten' and using it as a platform to remind us about piracy again. And again. And again.

That removing links to a specific piece of information is different from blocking piracy sites doesn't seem to occur to anyone:

Critics say that Google drags its feet over carrying out measures such as stripping pirate websites from its search results, yet the move to allow users the "right to be forgotten" proves it can take serious action if it is forced.

"It's 'Don't be Evil' 101," says Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the music industry's trade body, the BPI. "The principle at stake here is when you know someone is acting illegally, you shouldn't continue helping them by sending them business."

That's kind of the point, though, isn't it, Geoff? Because Google does take action when you ask it to:

The BPI made 4.6m requests to Google to remove pirate websites from its listings in the past month alone.

And Taylor even seems to understand that unlicenced music sites are a moving target...

Dealing with Google is often a fraught process, Taylor adds, and the illegal websites reappear in the same, or a slightly different, guise almost immediately after they are taken down.

... but not enough to process that he's expecting Google to know to take down a site before its brought to their attention somehow.

Maybe he should have checked the Google right to be forgotten form before talking about this, as he'd have understood then that all you can do is point to a URL you want quashed and provide a reason why. It's not having a whole category of things (for example, 'anything about Mike Smith') dumped from the index. So wailing 'why can't they treat "pirate" sites they way they treat embarrassing facts from the past' is a wail of a digital ingenue - because they're actually treating those facts based on the way they treat "pirates".