This article is more than 9 years old

This article is more than 9 years old

The government is to put pressure on Google to block illicit filesharing websites from its search results as part of fresh attempts to combat online piracy.

Google will on Wednesday face calls from the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to "make life more difficult" for sites that infringe copyright.

Hunt is expected to tell an audience of media executives that internet companies, advertisers and credit card firms should do more to clamp down on alleged rogue websites.

"We intend to take measures to make it more and more difficult to access sites that deliberately facilitate infringement, misleading consumers and depriving creators of a fair reward for their creativity," Hunt will tell the Royal Television Society convention in Cambridge on Wednesday evening.

The government will put pressure on Google and other companies to take action against rogue sites, but could introduce new legislation in the forthcoming communications bill.

Government ministers see Google as one of the key players in the fight against online piracy, chiefly because it is a portal to the web for nine out of 10 UK search engine users.

Google will be pressed to downgrade unlawful websites in search listings, potentially depriving them of millions of users and advertising revenue. The US company already responds to "reliable" takedown requests when issued by rights holders.

To combat the rogue sites, the culture minister wants to speed up the legal process so that websites can be ruled unlawful within weeks of being identified, rather than months or years.

Hunt is believed to be in favour of an independent cross-industry body – modelled on the Internet Watch Foundation, which takes action against child abuse websites – that will identify sites used for illicit filesharing and push for them to be blocked.

The use of the IWF model as a way to combat piracy was first raised as part of communications minister Ed Vaizey's industry round tables on web blocking at the end of last year.

"We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Neither should we tolerate it online," Hunt is expected to say.

The fresh measures will be announced just weeks after the government was forced to scrap plans to directly block filesharing websites, which was part of the previous Labour government's the Digital Economy Act.

Vince Cable, the business secretary, said at the time that more needs to be done to tackle the websites, but urged that any measures need to be "proportionate and based on evidence".

A spokesman for Google said: "Google has industry-leading measures to fight online piracy. We work hand in hand with copyright owners to remove infringing material from search results. Without a court order, any copyright owner can already use our removals process to inform us of copyright infringing content and have it removed from Google search.

"We recently announced a series of measures that make this process even easier, bringing our removal time down to an average of four hours."