Good versus evil
Search giant Google is having a busy week, and such is its influence in the fabric of the Internet, we shouldn't be surprised. The latest announcement appears to be designed to pre-emptively protect the company from accusations of facilitating online copyright infringement.
In a blog post entitled "making copyright work better online", general counsel Kent Walker said "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."
He went on to say that the growing volume of such requests has led Google to implement some more substantial measures to address the underlying problem, namely:
- Making it easier for rights-holders to submit DMCA take-down requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and web Search).
- At the same time improving ‘counter-notice' tools for people who think their content has been wrongly taken-down.
- Preventing terms associated with piracy from appearing in autocomplete.
- Improving procedures for expelling violators from its AdSense programme.
- Making authorised preview content easier to index and find.
Once more the motives behind these are laudable, if self-interested - much like the measures Google quickly put in place when it acquired YouTube. But once more they further position Google as the Internet police and raise questions about what extent, if any, Google should be able to favour some sites over others in its ranking algorithm.
The development we wrote about earlier today concerned Google punishing the ranking of websites it judges to be ‘bad', now it's proposing improving the ranking of those judged as ‘good'. You have to wonder where all this will end.
