Google said Thursday that it expects to introduce more stringent copyright protection policies to prevent questionable web sites from participating in Google’s services. The goal is to protect content creators from having their intellectual property exploited, the company said.
According to Google General Counsel Kent Walker, the new policies will be rolled out over the next several months. “We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time,” Walker wrote in a blog Thursday. “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.”
Targeting the Bad Apples
Google is promising to build tools to make it easier for rights holders to file violation notices against the Internet’s “bad apples,” beginning with Google products such as 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 explained.
The new effort is good news for the music, TV and motion-picture industries, which lose a huge amount of revenue to piracy each year. “Most users want to access legitimate content and are interested in sites that make that content available to them — even if only on a preview basis,” Walker wrote. “We’ll be looking at ways to make this content easier to index and find.”
At YouTube, Google already offers Content ID — a set of audio and video matching tools that give content providers controls to manage their content if someone uploads it. Participating rights holders provide reference files for comparing with the content on YouTube, and when matches are found the rights holder is given the opportunity to block, track or earn money from creations.
“We’re seeing media companies make the most of…