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Digital Top Stories
Minister to pressure Google to do more to block infringing websites
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 14 September 2011
Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt will today call on Google to do more to discourage people from accessing websites that exist primarily to enable copyright infringement. That is to say, the minister will ask the web firm to go further with its measures to downgrade or remove links to sites that infringe.
According to The Guardian, Hunt will tell the Royal Television Society convention in Cambridge: “We intend to take measures to make it more and more difficult to access sites that deliberately facilitate infringement, misleading consumers and depriving creators of a fair reward for their creativity”.
Quite what those measures are remain to be seen, ie whether the Department Of Culture, Media And Sport hopes that by putting pressure on search engines it can achieve results, or whether there are actually plans to legislate in anyway. Though we do know that Hunt advocates the idea of forming an independent body which would decide which websites exist primarily to infringe, and which should, therefore, be de-listed by search engines.
According to the paper, Hunt will conclude: “We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Neither should we tolerate it online”.
Google, of course, has already instigated some measures for cutting infringing websites from its search results and ad sales network. Responding to Hunt’s planned speech, the web giant told The Guardian: “Google has industry-leading measures to fight online piracy. We work hand in hand with copyright owners to remove infringing material from search results. Without a court order, any copyright owner can already use our removals process to inform us of copyright infringing content and have it removed from Google search. We recently announced a series of measures that make this process even easier, bringing our removal time down to an average of four hours”.
