Disney Fights Piracy With New Search Patent
To combat rampant Internet piracy, Disney has filed for and won a patent that will help filter out stolen content.
The Internet has made it much easier for consumers to pirate copyrighted material from companies like Disney. So to combat this, Disney has decided to take action by filing for and winning a patent that will help filter out stolen content.
The patent is described as an “online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for Web elements.”
The Abstract as part of the filing is as follows:
“Methods and systems for identifying and ranking search results and online advertisements based on authenticity are described. A search server includes an authenticity index, which includes authenticity metric values associated with one or more Web elements. The authenticity metric values may indicate the relative authority of the Web element with respect to a specific category, keyword, search term, phrase, context, filter, etc. Search results may be generated and ranked based on the authenticity metric values.”
As part of the background shared in the filing documents, Disney believes that what the search industry needs are “systems and methods that provide high-quality search results and other rankings, and that filter for undesirable search and other results.”
What Disney is really driving at is authenticity of results. It is pushing for search results that are not based on sheer popularity, but instead those that have a legitimate claim to the content shown.
The company has even gone so far as to create Disney Search, which is a search engine just for Disney-related information and products. This search engine will only crawl Disney-owned websites, so users know the information provided is legitimate.
It is unclear how exactly Disney plans to use this patent to compete with more popular search engines like Google and Bing. However, one can speculate that Disney is more interested in protecting its content than competing with larger search engines.
According to Digital Trends, Google has also begun beefing up its quality control measures. In recent years, many large corporations have looked to Google to begin cracking down on piracy on the Internet, so Google has downranked sites that were hosting illegal content and instead promoted the sites that had rightful ownership of that content.