Google strengthens online copyright protections, adjusts search to punish poor reviews

Google announced a series of steps Thursday aimed at reducing the amount of copyright infringements online.

"As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content. We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time," said Google general counsel Kent Walker in a blog post.

Walker said moving forward Google will act on copyright takedown notices for products such as Blogger and search results within 24 hours and make it easier for rights holders to submit takedown requests. Google will also prevent search terms closely associated with piracy from appearing as part of its autocomplete function.

The music and movie industries offered cautious praise for the announcement, calling the steps encouraging but emphasizing that more would need to be done to safeguard rights holders.

"Google deserves credit for proposing a constructive set of reforms and undertaking useful steps to better protect the rights of creators and encourage legal ways to enjoy music," said Recording Industry Association of America chairman Mitch Bainwol.

"While there is much more work to be done, this announcement is an important acknowledgement that everyone involved in the online ecosystem has a shared responsibility to constructively address the online piracy problem that is devastating the creative industries," he added.

Google also announced it will tweak its search algorithm in response to a story from The New York Times about an online merchant who said negative customer reviews boosted his company in the search results and increased his business.

"In the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience," said Google Fellow Amit Singhal. "The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result."