On Thursday, Google announced that it will begin improving its responses to DMCA takedown notices. In conjunction with that move they intend to prevent piracy-related websites from making profits from Google’s advertising networks and services.
Take a quick look at part of the blog post from googlepublicpolicy:
That’s why today we’re announcing four changes that we’ll be implementing over the next several months:
- We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours. We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submitDMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and web Search). And for copyright owners who 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-noticeâ€tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.
- We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing inAutocomplete. 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.
- We will improve our AdSense anti-piracy review. We have always prohibited the use of our AdSense program on web pages that provide infringing materials. Building on our existing DMCA takedown procedures, we will be working with rightsholders to identify, and, when appropriate, expel violators from the AdSense program.
- We will experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results. Not surprisingly, we’re big fans of making authorised 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.
These changes build on our continuing efforts, such as Content ID, to give rightsholders choice and control over the use of their content, and we look forward to further refining and improving our processes in ways that help both rightsholders and users.
Google is now moving to take on a new role, Piracy Police. Here’s where I see to be problem. A search engine is built and designed to search the web for YOUR search terms. Once these implementations are put into effect, your terms are not going to be what they want you to view. If autocomplete is causing a problem because more and more people are broke and looking for ways to get entertainment for free, take the autocomplete out of the system. I am also extremely concerned about the first part of the blog. Are they going to take aim at the blog sites who post news and images that may unknowingly be copyrighted? If the images are taken from Google image search, who is really in violation?
I know something like this won’t hinder Google in the long run, even if they identify a million AdSense violations and lose the spots on these sites. It seems to me to be another step toward net neutrality which will ultimately filter down to our beloved OPEN Android devices and start blocking applications and sites that I might view.
Am I completely wrong, or am I just an extremist that doesn’t feel there is a piracy problem in the world?
Source: ZDNet
