Google Plans on Fighting Piracy With Search

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google said Thursday that it has taken a new stance on copyright take-down requests to help reduce piracy on the Internet.

The search giant said it now plans on acting on reliable copyright take-down requests within 24 hours and will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products.

"For copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we'll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less," said Kent Walker, Google's general counsel. "At the same time, we'll improve our 'counter-notice' tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests."

Walker said Google would start initially with web search and Blogger.

With the initiative, Google also will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete, which offers searches that might be similar to the one surfers type in the field.

It also will improve its AdSense anti-piracy review and expel violators from the AdSense program. Some say Google helped finance piracy by allowing file-sharing networks to participate in AdSense.

Google also plans to experiment to make authorized preview content more readily accessible in search results.

"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," Walker said. "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," he said.

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