As the battle over intellectual property and online piracy heats up, web titan Google is announcing some significant changes to the way it deals with copyright infringement on its ubiquitous search engine. In making the changes, Google seems to be sending a message that it is a good citizen when it comes to online copyright infringement, and it's taking some very tangible steps to demonstrate that.

The big picture is that Google just got quite a bit more inhospitable for people and websites that violate digital copyright law.

"There are more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the Web and more than 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute," Kent Walker, General Counsel at Google, wrote in a blog post. "It’s some pretty fantastic stuff – content that makes us think, laugh, and learn new things. Services we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago – iTunes, NetFlix, YouTube, and many others – help us access this content and let traditional and emerging creators profit from and share their work with the world."

"But along with this new wave of creators come some bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright," Walker wrote. "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. 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."

One of the main goals of the changes is to increase the speed and efficiency with which the company addresses copyright takedown notices sent to Google under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the seminal law that protects websites like Google and Facebook from liability if they promptly remove infringing content when notified by copyright owners. Google already receives thousands of such requests; the goal of these changes is to streamline the process both for itself and rights-holders.

"We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours," Walker wrote. "We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and Web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we’ll improve our 'counter-notice' tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests."

Google says that it will also “prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete,” the search engine’s tool that fills in the query box as you type.

Additionally, the company says it will work with rights-holders to "expel violators" from its AdSense ad serving product. Google has always prohibited AdSense on sites that provide infringing materials. Here, again, the company's goal is to work with rights-holders to make the process faster and more efficient.

Finally, Google says it will "experiment to make authorized preview content more readily accessible in search results." In other words, the company will now actively be trying to make sites with legitimate content "easier to index and find." While the details of this particular initiative are still somewhat vague, one can see what Google is trying to do — create incentives for good behavior and disincentives for bad behavior.

In other words, play by the rules and Google wants to make your site "more readily accessible." Don't play by the rules and say sayonara the world's biggest search engine.

The changes will be rolled out over the next several months.

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