Mountain View, California — As the battle over intellectual property and online piracy escalates, search engine titan Google, in response to pressure from music and film companies and other copyright holders, announced a number of measures on Thursday intended to the way it deals with copyright infringement on its ubiquitous search engine, including a promise to work with content owners requests for the removal of websites that do not respect copyright out of its AdSense program within 24 hours.
Surprisingly, the great picture here is that Google just lost its temper for people and websites that violate digital copyright law. However, the measures will not extend to Google-owned YouTube
Announcing the changes in a post on its public policy blog, the search engine leader seems to be sending a message that it is a good citizen when it comes to online copyright infringement, and it is taking a stricter stance to thwart “bad apples” that post or share pirated material on its own sites and the sites of its partners.
“As the web has evolved, we have seen an increasing number of issues relating to infringing content,” Google general counsel Kent Walker said in a blog post.
“There are more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the Web and more than 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Along with this new wave of creators come some bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright.,” Walker, wrote in a blog post.
Nevertheless, there are some excellently engaging stuff out there — content that makes us think, laugh, and learn new things. Services we could not have imagined ten years ago — iTunes, NetFlix, YouTube, and many others — help us access this content and let traditional and emerging creators profit from and share their work with the world.
The search engine said it will implement four major changes over the next several months. The company will introduce new tools to make the process easier for rights holders to submit takedown requests. In addition to monitoring AdSense sites more closely for material like pirated audio files, the company also said it would do the following:
- Improve its response time to 24 hours or less when content owners complain about pirated material showing up on Google sites like Blogger or within Web search results.
- Ensure that Autocomplete does not fill in words that are closely related to searches for pirated content.
- Experiment to make “authorized content” more readily available in search results. This could be something along the lines of the iLike song previews that show up when users search for a particular song title.
“We respond efficiently to requests to takedown such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the Web evolves, and the number of requests grows with it, we are functioning to develop new ways to better address the inherent problem, Walker, wrote in a blog post.”
“These changes have been developed in our continuing efforts, such as Content ID, to give rights holders choice and control over the use of their content,” Walker said. “We look forward to further refining and improving our processes in ways that help both rights holders and users,” he added.
One of the main objectives of this changes is to enhance speed and efficiency with which the company addresses copyright takedown notices sent to Google under the “Digital Millenium Copyright Act,” the seminal law that protects websites like Google and Facebook from liability if they promptly remove infringing content when notified by copyright owners. Google already receives thousands of such requests; the goal of these changes is to streamline the process both for itself and rights-holders.
“We will act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours,” Walker wrote. “We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rights-holders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and Web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we will reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we will improve our ‘counter-notice’ tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.”
The timing of the announcement is a little curious — it is not like there is a sudden burst of newly pirated content showing up on Google or AdSense sites. But, the search engine giant is currently facing the wrath of a new antitrust investigation from the EU, and it needs allies where it can find them. Making nice with big content owners, who have recently accused the company of not doing enough to combat piracy, is a start.