A 64-page report released by Google claimed progress in the war on "piracy", but also noted a new battlefront in the form of "add-on" software that can be installed on legitimate open-source media players such as the Kodi box to illicitly stream copyrighted content.

It is war and new battlefronts. How interesting ruling class started to use terms.

Set-top boxes with suspicious add-ons are removed from Google Shopping, while apps with pre-installed "Kodi add-ons" giving access to pirate sites are removed from the Play Store, according to the internet firm.

Removed from Google Shopping, mine god. Is it free or you need to pay them for this?

Research from MPAA found only about 19% of traffic to pirate sites comes from search engines,83 and if reasonable assumptions are applied, data from this study indicates this number may be closer to 7%.84 Further, research that Google co-sponsored with PRS for Music in the U.K. confirmed that traffic from search engines is not what keeps these sites in business.

And it is nice thing, as avoiding Google is good idea.

As Google removed around 3 billion URLs without any court order, just by bots filling forms (btw it is for long time used to damage normal sites).

A YouTube "Content ID" tool creates digital fingerprints of sorts of copyrighted content and then automatically detects it online, allowing owners to have it removed or monetized.

Actually Youtube ID is absurd idiotic thing. Where owner of 5 seconds of music can get 100% of money for very complex and useful video. Why it is possible? Because owner is setting the rules around, and poor creator is at most just petty bourgeoisie with lot of phantasies.

Google and their friends had been able to pause progress in free information spreading due to few actions that allowed them to slow it down, including introduction of torrents into mainstream - it allowed to focus fight on web space again and detect and filter almost fixed protocol.

Next phase will be move from sites back into complex clients, with added invention of extremely complex dynamic protocols that can mimic existing ones to overload filtering/detection stages in routers.