Not for the first time, Google have provoked the ire of the British Phonographic Industry. 

Google Play launched yesterday in the UK, and has been pitched as a direct rival to Apple’s ubiquitous iTunes software. As well as offering a retail service, Google Play also allows users to store up to 20,000 tracks on a cloud server free of charge. Although the music industry have, in part, welcomed the service as a legal alternative to illegitimate filesharing, not everyone has had a kind word to say about the project.

As BBC Newsbeat report, the BPI has criticised Google for failing to do enough to excise links to illegal filesharing sites from its search engine. The criticism is familiar – indeed, the BPI took Google to task on similar charges back in July  – but the BPI sound as peeved as ever.

BPI chief exec Geoff Taylor offered the following criticisms: “We don’t think it makes any sense for them to be doing something which does support artists and then, on the other hand, undermine artists by referring consumers to illegal sites….We personally think three months should be long enough to get it working”.

Google Play’s Sami Valknonen responded by pointing out that Google Play’s operations are run by a different body to the search engine proper: “The way that our search engine works is a completely separate algorithm from anything we do on Google Play. Our search algorithm is a very complex beast and how it works, I have no clue…I think it’s something that is hopefully going to make piracy obsolete because it’s so easy to operate within the bounds of the law that there is really no need to go beyond them”.