Digital Top Stories

Google pledges to be more proactive over copyright

By | Published on Friday 3 December 2010

Google yesterday pleased many a music industry exec by announcing a number of initiatives to make it harder for copyright infringing websites to benefit from the web giant’s services. 

Bosses across the music, TV, film and other content industries have long moaned that various Google services have too frequently hosted or linked to or promoted or generated revenue for websites that exist primarily to infringe their copyrights. And while Google has, in the main, ensured it stayed on the right side of (mainly US) copyright law, content owners have long wished the web firm would be more proactive in this domain. 

Via a post on their company blog, Google yesterday announced various initiatives to tackle copyright issues. 

Firstly, it has vowed to simplify and speed up the process for content owners issuing takedown notices against infringing content under America’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This process is already pretty efficient over on Google’s YouTube platform, but less so elsewhere, with some smaller content owners claiming it can take months for the web giant to respond. Under the new system Google would hope to act within 24 hours. A similarly more efficient system will be provided for those websites who are incorrectly targeted by a takedown notices and who wish to appeal. 

Although this new system will be welcomed by content owners, in reality Google’s actual policy as to what content they shouldn’t host or link to won’t change, it’s just the system for removal and appeals will be more efficient. Therefore it’s possibly the other initiatives announced yesterday that are of more interest. 

First, Google has pledged to more rigorously assess websites that sign up to its Google ad words service, whereby sites post Google generated ads on their sites and earn revenues from them. Content owners have long complained how many infringing sites are profiting via this service. 

Secondly, Google has said it will work to ensure their search engine doesn’t automatically suggest search terms that will almost certainly link to infringing content. So that when you type in “Kanye West” in the Google search box it doesn’t suggest words like “torrent”, “P2P”, “file-sharing” and “free downloads” in its auto-complete drop down list.

And thirdly, Google has pledged to work with content owners to ensure their legitimate sites rate higher in search result list. Quite how this will work is yet to be determined, and might require content owners to provide a little extra something for the search service. That might include preview clips of music or videos being linked to, accessed through the search page. That’s something Google has already done in the US via a partnership with MySpace, but moving forward it might be something they will expect labels to offer directly for free in return for priority search result positioning. 

It is probably too soon to say quite what impact these pledges will have on the presence of unlicensed content, or links to such content, on the Google network, but just by seeming to be more proactive on copyright issues the web giant might win some new fans in the music business, maybe even among those music organisations who still see the web giant as the enemy, such as German collecting society GEMA. 

And some reckon that’s the main aim here. Especially as Google is known to be negotiating with major record companies and collecting societies about their plans to launch an iTunes competing music service. These moves may be designed to speed those negotiations up.



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