Google doesn't recognise or penalise stolen content

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I think this is pretty fair on Google's part. How could you possibly figure out who owned content?

What if I published a book, it was copy-pasted in blogs, and then later I put it somewhere crawlable by Google? You certainly can't just say "first time we saw it, that's the proper owner". It would either require a massive amount of manual QA to get right (and even then, there are going to be interminable copyright battles), or have a super high error rate.

I think Google's best value is letting proper content owners easily find violators via normal searches, and let them deal with them via takedown notices or the court system -- which is where it should be done, not in a pseudo-court run by a Google who does not want what responsibility.

There is no such thing as "Stolen" content.

This came up before on YC.[1] Google does have a system to detect provenance, but you have to report your changes to Google as an RSS feed.[2] Google hasn't updated that page since 2010, and it may no longer do anything.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 [2] https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/

This is not stealing, and even if it is illegal that is a bad way to put it. Also, google's service is primarily to the searcher so this isn't a huge issue for them.