Google Proclaims War On Piracy

It's time for Google to stand up to illegitimate sources of content, or so they say, with a new rankings system based on the number of valid copyright removable notices they receive. It's not long now that pirates of all types will be having a much harder time finding that torrent of the newest blockbuster film they've been wanting to see since it came out a day ago. Today's announcement from Google is just one more update to their copyright removal initiative re-booted just over two years ago.

This new system will take into account every one of the Copyright Removal Requests they receive that turn out to be valid. You can see the TOTAL number of requests at Google's Transparency Report website in the Copyright Removal Requests Overview. At the moment they're at 4,308,618 over the past month alone. Sites with a higher number of removal requests levied against them will be appearing lower in search results via Google.

Google is currently receiving and processing more copyright removal notices each and every day than they did through the entirety of the year 2009. Google had the following to say on their process in today's announcement:

"Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law. So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search results, we won't be removing any pages from search results unless we receive a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner. And we'll continue to provide "counter-notice" tools so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated. We'll also continue to be transparent about copyright removals." – Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering, Google

Stay tuned as Google continues to make their search results more perfectly tuned according to the whims of the society we all live in. Sound alright to you?

[via Google]