14 DAY TRIAL // In the midst of a “war” between pirates and the entertainment industry, Google has sided with legitimate content providers and promises to remove websites hosting copyright infringing material from search results faster, as well as ban certain piracy-related terms from autocomplete.
In a new post on its public policy blog, Google announces several changes to be implemented over the next few months that aim at lowering the level of copyright infringing content accessible through some of its services, web Search and Blogger in particular.
In this respect, the company promises that it will act on DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown requests within 24 hours of receiving them.
However, for transparency reasons it will also make them publicly searchable and will improve its counter-claim tools available to people who want to object to takedowns.
Another major change involves banning certain terms closely associated with content piracy from appearing in search suggestions.
“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,” the company says.
The search giant also plans to work with rightsholders to identify and suspend AdSense accounts that make money by displaying ads on sites hosting pirated content.
Finally, the fourth change involves making so called authorized preview content “more readily accessible in search results.” The company is not clear on what “preview content” means, but it’s most likely video and audio samples.
The blog post does not go into details about how this will be achieved, the company only saying that it will experiment with ways of making such content easier to index and find.
Google’s crack down on copyright infringement doesn’t touch on the subject of YouTube, because a video identification technology known as Content ID is already being used to identify copyright violations on that service.