Google promises improved measures to combat piracy

Google has pledged further measures to help combat piracy online.

In a blogpost yesterday (2 December), Kent Walker, general counsel for Google, says the company will “act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours”.

He outlined intentions to prevent terms associated with piracy from appearing in Google’s autocomplete function, which predicts user searches.

Actual search results, however, will remain the same and illegal websites will still show.

Walker says: “We’ll build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and web search).

He adds: “For copyright owners that use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we’ll improve our counter notice tools for those that believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.

“While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.”

Other measures include the promotion of legal film and music content providers and the expulsion of “violators” from AdSense.

“Building on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown procedures [which protect websites like Google and Facebook from liability if they promptly remove infringing content when notified by copyright owners], we’ll be working with rightsholders to identify and, when appropriate, expel violators from its sponsored links programme AdSense,” wrote Walker.

“Not surprisingly, we’re big fans of making authorized content more accessible on the internet. Most users want to access legitimate content and are interested in sites that make that content available to them (even if only on a preview basis). We’ll be looking at ways to make this content easier to index and find,” he adds.

This story first appeared on newmediaage.co.uk