When people search for a movie or video, many a times they end up on websites which offer pirated content. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that the affected party can do about such violations, except to report the copyrights infringement to Google and hope that the plea is found among millions of copyrights violation notices and the copyrights violator is unable to rank in Google results. Now, Google is taking a tough stance against websites involved in copyrights infringement to change the game.
Recently, Google announced on its official blog that starting next week, Google will start taking into account the “valid copyright removal notices” that have been received against websites. This means that websites with high removal notices might begin to see a fall in their appearance in Google search results.
By doing this, Google aims at providing users with what it believes to be legitimate and high-quality search results, instead of showing results from websites which are violating copyrights. This may mean that when a user searches on e.g. a song, he/she might get results from more authentic sources such as Hulu or Spotify.
Google has explained that since its policy improvements that came over 2 years back, Google has been receiving more copyrights violation complaints than it did in 2009. In fact, a figure quoted by Google goes as high as more than 4.3 million links reported over the last 30 days.
While his may be a positive move by Google to thwart copyrights infringement, however as the volume of piracy increases, it is unlikely that these results will be considered as “more relevant” by many users. This is because the biggest root cause for copyrights violations are the changing habits of users who have begun to consider piracy as their right. In such a case it is required that companies should try to setup platforms where they can make money by providing some services for free, e.g. movies. A good example of how this can be done is Hulu (minus the location restricted viewing factor).
