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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Google moving against potential pirate sites
LOS ANGELES -- Hollywood and other content owners, whose relationship with Google is fitful at best, gave the Silicon Valley search company rare praise Friday for its move to penalize websites that have been flagged by copyright holders for potentially hosting pirated entertainment.
In a blog post on the company's website, Google explained the changes it had made to its search algorithm, which determines what results it provides to people using its search engine.
"Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site," wrote Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president of engineering. "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 -- whether it's a song previewed on NPR's music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify."
Singhal noted Google is deluged with notices from copyright holders such as music labels and movie studios alerting them to sites that have potentially trafficked in pirated content. In the last 30 days, it processed requests about 4.3 million links to such websites, he said, more than the company received in all of 2009.
Groups representing the movie and music companies were quick to laud Google for the move. The Recording Industry Association of America in a statement said: "This change is an important step in the right direction a step we've been urging Google to take for a long time and we commend the company for its action."
Google over the years has struggled to balance what it regards as a need for an open and unrestricted Internet with pressure from content holders to censure sites that promote piracy. Friday's move, while welcomed by movie studios and music labels, displeased advocates of the free Internet camp.
-- Los Angeles Times
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 11, 2012 B6
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