I think your proposed policy is very short-sighted.
More than ever, thanks to the Internet and ideas like social networking and search engines, independent artists of whatever genre can compete directly with the industry behemoths on merit. These are exactly the kind of people copyright is supposed to help. This is the very essence of promoting the creation and distribution of new works!
If massive industry players like Google are permitted to turn a blind eye to the side effects of their vast resources and almost monopolistic influence, while at the same time making staggering amounts of money helping many people to infringe copyright, then all this does is squash the little guys. It gives all the power back to the industry giants who are big enough to throw their weight around anyway. You know, the ones who have been price gouging for decades and pushing DRM and hiring whole departments to issue takedown notices to anything that vaguely resembles a title of a song they once sold and funding organisations that threaten to sue just about anyone in one of the most flagrant violations of any justice system in recent memory?
Frankly, I think Google have been incredibly lucky that the arm's length/safe harbour philosophy has held up so strongly so far in the global legal landscape. Given that the very thing that makes them so potentially damaging to legal rightsholders is their scale, and they make vast sums of money because of that scale, it would not have been unreasonable to go down a different path and impose more of a burden on them in terms of preventing abuse of their systems to break the law.
If they voluntarily take reasonable steps in that direction anyway, it sends the right message about corporate social responsibility. That alone is worth orders of magnitude more to them than the eyeballs of seventeen people who are going to go use Duck Duck Go for their searches instead. But it also supports the people who actually created the works you apparently enjoy enough to search for them but not enough to pay for them, which is ultimately good for everyone except freeloaders, since it promotes creation of more work, which more people can then search for on Google, and more people can then enjoy.
You're assuming that legitimate sites that help independent artists won't receive many copyright takedown requests. It's difficult for sites to control what their users upload and they typically rely on the DMCA. If this system is abused, new legitimate sites that respect DMCA can still be buried.
This does level the playing field for Youtube. They've been facing issues with videos that have been filtered for content falling under fair use and over-aggressive labels making mistaken takedowns. A new user-contributed video startup will now have to develop the same filtering and protections, or they risk being buried by Google through this system.
More than ever, thanks to the Internet and ideas like social networking and search engines, independent artists of whatever genre can compete directly with the industry behemoths on merit. These are exactly the kind of people copyright is supposed to help. This is the very essence of promoting the creation and distribution of new works!
If massive industry players like Google are permitted to turn a blind eye to the side effects of their vast resources and almost monopolistic influence, while at the same time making staggering amounts of money helping many people to infringe copyright, then all this does is squash the little guys. It gives all the power back to the industry giants who are big enough to throw their weight around anyway. You know, the ones who have been price gouging for decades and pushing DRM and hiring whole departments to issue takedown notices to anything that vaguely resembles a title of a song they once sold and funding organisations that threaten to sue just about anyone in one of the most flagrant violations of any justice system in recent memory?
Frankly, I think Google have been incredibly lucky that the arm's length/safe harbour philosophy has held up so strongly so far in the global legal landscape. Given that the very thing that makes them so potentially damaging to legal rightsholders is their scale, and they make vast sums of money because of that scale, it would not have been unreasonable to go down a different path and impose more of a burden on them in terms of preventing abuse of their systems to break the law.
If they voluntarily take reasonable steps in that direction anyway, it sends the right message about corporate social responsibility. That alone is worth orders of magnitude more to them than the eyeballs of seventeen people who are going to go use Duck Duck Go for their searches instead. But it also supports the people who actually created the works you apparently enjoy enough to search for them but not enough to pay for them, which is ultimately good for everyone except freeloaders, since it promotes creation of more work, which more people can then search for on Google, and more people can then enjoy.