As of yesterday, the websites of companies served with a high volume of copyright notices, may be found lower down the rankings when a Google search is done on them.
Amit Singhal, senior vice president of engineering at Google said: “Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.”
And he added: “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.
“So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search results, we won’t be removing any pages from search results unless we receive a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner. And 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.”
The move has been welcomed by the creative industries, with Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of the British Recorded Music Industry saying: “We have argued for some time that sites with a lot of illegal content should feature lower in search rankings, based on the notifications we send to Google.
“Consumers overwhelmingly want and expect the top search results for entertainment content to feature legal, licensed services. We will look carefully at how much impact this change will have in practice, but we welcome the announcement from Google and will be pressing other search engines to follow suit.”
Earlier this year Google reported that it was receiving more copyright notices and takedown requests from rights holders in a week than it did in the whole of 2009.
For more information about intellectual property law, speak to our solicitor Chloe Bunn.