Google Taking Steps to Improve Copyright Compliance Online

Online pirates beware: Google (News - Alert) says it’s taking a tougher stance toward copyright violations as well as online piracy.

The company is undertaking four initiatives that, Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, says in a blog post, will be implemented over the next several months. These include:

* Google will act on “responsible copyright takedown requests” within 24 hours. Tools will make it easier for rights holders to submit their DMCA takedown requests for Google products. The process will commence with Blogger and web Search.

“For copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less,” Walker said. “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.”

* Google will keep terms that are “closely associated with piracy” from showing up in the Autocomplete feature.

“While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose,” Walker says.

* Google will improve anti-piracy review for the AdSense feature.

“We have always prohibited the use of our AdSense program on web pages that provide infringing materials,” Walker says, but now “we will be working with rights holders to identify, and, when appropriate, expel violators from the AdSense program.”

* Google will “experiment” to find ways to make “authorized preview content” increasingly “accessible” in users’ search results.

The need for these steps comes as there is phenomenal growth of online content, with many new creators increasingly adding even more content.

“As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content. We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we are working to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem,” Walker says.

“We look forward to further refining and improving our processes in ways that help both rights holders and users,” Walker added.

In other company news, TrueView is being launched by Google. The new format for YouTube (News - Alert) ads was announced in September, according to a report from TMCnet.