The Google Public Policy Blog announced that Google will be improving the process of reporting, counter-reporting and taking action on copyright infringement online, starting with Blogger and Web Search.
Google said the implementations of these new features and policies will go into effect over the next several months. The new changes include, and I quote:
- 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 submit DMCA 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-notice" 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 in Autocomplete. While it's hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, well 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, were 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.
Folks over at WebmasterWorld are both interested in seeing what happens but also not too confident it will improve things. One even said, "Does that mean they are going to remove their preview pages from SERPS? No, thought not."
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Google Blogoscoped Forums.
