Google has announced about its new search policy which aims at penalizing sites that serve pirated content. The company’s new ranking process will consider the number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests a site has received.
Sites that have received a higher number of DMCA takedown requests will be placed lower in a user's Google search results.
It should be noticed that Google will take into consideration only valid takedown notices from right holders and that the company itself will not be judging whether a site is infringing on copyrighted content.
"Only copyright holders know if something is authorised, 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," Google senior vice president of engineering Amit Singhal said in a company blog post.
The company noted that it now obtains a large amount of data on copyright infringers on the Internet.
"In fact, we are now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices in one day than we did in all of 2009, more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone," Singhal noted.
