Beginning this week, Google will take into account the number of valid copyright removal notices the company receives for a particular site.
“Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily”, Amit Singhal, senior vice president of engineering at Google, explained in a blog.
“Since we re-booted our copyright removals over two years ago, we’ve been given much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online. In fact, we’re now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone. We will now be using this data as a signal in our search rankings”, Singhal added.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said it welcomed Google’s announcement, but wanted to see how the company implements its new search policy.
“We are optimistic that Google’s actions will help steer consumers to the myriad legitimate ways for them to access movies and TV shows online, and away from the rogue cyberlockers, peer-to-peer sites, and other outlaw enterprises that steal the hard work of creators across the globe. We will be watching this development closely – the devil is always in the details – and look forward to Google taking further steps to ensure that its services favor legitimate businesses and creators, not thieves”, said MPAA spokesman Michael O’Leary.