Google announces piracy crackdown

In what could prove a very big blow to the activities of internet pirates, Google has announced a number of new policies designed to limit the accessibility of illegal content online.

In a document entitled ‘Making Copyright Work Better Online’ on its Public Policy blog, Google has ledged to radically increase its support for rights holders.

Its new initiatives include:

* A pledge to act on reliable takedown requests within 24 hours”. Google is developing new tools to make the submissions process easier, with faster responses promised to those who use the tools responsibly”.

* Terms closely associated with piracy” are to be blocked from appearing in Autocomplete boxes.

* The AdSense program will be more closely monitored with violators of the new terms being expelled from the platform altogether.

* Pre-authorised content is to be prioritised in search results.

Google has also said it will improve its counter-notice” tools for those who believe content was removed incorrectly.

There are more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the web and more than 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute,” the post reads. It’s some pretty fantastic stuff – content that makes us think, laugh, and learn new things. Services we couldn’t 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.

But along with this new wave of creators come some bad apples who use the internet to infringe copyright. As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content.

We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we are working to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem.”