Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) has vowed to become more strict on sites flagged by copyright owners over copyright infringements, by expressing that such sites will be lowly ranked on its search engine. The company published a statement on its blog, outlining new measures designed to penalize sites that generate several complaints from copyright owners.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) is quoted in the statement saying, “We will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site.” The tech giant also added, “sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.”
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) receives nearly nearly 4.3 million cases on a monthly basis, and believes the new measures will also help users find legitimate, quality search results more easily. Additionally, the blog publication says, “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.”
However, the search engine giant was very categorical in regard to blocking sites. It expressed that only copyright owners can determine whether a certain piece of content infringes their copyrights, and hence, only they can give a go ahead for removals, or blocking.
“Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law, said Goolge via the blog post. Google also added, we’ll continue to provide “counter-notice” tools, so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated. We’ll also continue to be transparent about copyright removals.”
