Google Vs. the "Bad Apples": Four Steps Against Copyright Infringement

As the company behind the world’s most popular search engine, a video site that famously gets more than 35 hours of video uploaded every minute and a blogging network that allows an undisclosed number of users to self-publish, Google has a lot of content on its hands.

While much of this content is precisely what makes the Web go ’round, Google says that there are some "bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright." The company has laid out a number of steps it says it will take to ensure that it does its part to "better address the underlying problem".

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This underlying problem, for Google, is that it plays host to not only the content itself, but links in the form of search results and more. The company laid out four changes it says it will implement over the coming months to help battle copyright infringement.

First, Google says it will "act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours," for copyright owners who "use the tools responsibly". It says it will do the same for counter-notice complaints "for those who believe their content was wrongly removed."

Secondly, Google is going to "prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete." The company acknowledges that this may be difficult to implement and, with Google Instant, we can’t say that it doesn’t sound a bit scary. Already, the site has many terms it won’t include in autocomplete. Now, we have to imagine terms like "torrent" and "download" and "episode" are likely to disappear too? Where does this end, exactly?

The final points seem more innocuous. Google says it will improve its anti-piracy review for Adsense, to make sure ad revenue isn’t derived from ads shown on "pages that provide infringing materials," as well as "experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results."

What do you think about Google’s plans to prevent copyright infringement? While we can heartily agree with quick response to DMCA takedowns and counter-notices, what about removing terms from autocomplete? How much more filtering do you want on the Web’s most trafficked gateway to content?

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