Google has released a report – How Google Fights Piracy – which covers the programmes, policies, and technologies it has put in place to combat piracy online.

Writing in the Google Public Policy Blog, Fred von Lohmann, Legal Director, Copyright, notes that more music, video, text and software is being created on the Internet by more people in more places than ever before. “Every kind of creative endeavour, both amateur and professional, is being transformed by the new opportunities and lower costs made possible by digital tools and online distribution. But copyright infringement remains a problem online, and Google is working hard to tackle it,” he says.

Among the report’s highlights:

• Better Legal Alternatives: The best way to fight piracy is with better, convenient, legal alternatives. On YouTube and Play, Google is committed to creating those compelling alternatives for users. Each time a music fan chooses YouTube or Play over an unauthorised source, for example, it’s a victory against piracy. And thousands of copyright owners now use Content ID on YouTube to elect to monetise user-generated content on YouTube, rather than take it down, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties from Google each year.
• Follow the Money: When it comes to rogue sites that specialise in online piracy, other anti-piracy strategies will have limited effect so long as there is money to be made by their operators. As a global leader in online advertising, Google is committed to rooting out and ejecting rogue sites from our advertising services, to ensure that they are not being misused to fund these sites. In 2012, we disabled ad serving to more than 46,000 sites for violating our copyright policies, the vast majority detected through our proactive efforts. We are also working with other leaders in the industry to craft best practices aimed at raising standards across the entire online advertising industry.
• Removing Infringing Results from Search: When it comes to Search, Google is a leader in addressing the concerns of copyright owners, responding to more copyright removal notices, and faster, than ever before. During 2012, copyright owners and their agents sent us removal notices for more than 57 million web pages. Our turnaround time on those notices was, on average, less than 6 hours. That’s faster than we managed in 2011, despite a 15-fold increase in the volume of requests.

“Hundreds of Google employees work on the problem of piracy online, and we will continue to work with copyright owners to focus our energies on combating the problem,” he concludes.

Categories: Articles, Piracy, Policy, Rights