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Digital
Google starts to introduce promised new anti-piracy measures
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 28 January 2011
Some of the anti-piracy measures announced by Google last year have gone into action. As previously reported, the web giant last month made various pledges to ensure Google services don’t actively support websites that exist solely to enable piracy. Some of those pledges were about making existing anti-piracy efforts more effective, others dealt with little bug bears that have frustrated content companies for some time.
One of those bug bears was that when you typed an artist’s name into the Google search engine it would automatically recommend additional search terms that would likely lead to illegal content – terms like “torrent”. And that’s one of the things Google is addressing this week, stopping those terms from being recommended. Of course, that’s not to stop users typing in “torrent” themselves, and torrent sources of content will still then come up in such search results.
Some argue Google’s new anti-piracy measures are token gestures to smooth the way for licensing talks with the big record companies regarding the web firm’s planned new music service and won’t have a huge tangible impact. While on the other side of the equation some say the new measures go too far, for example, what if there is a legitimate torrent source of some content?
