Google, the world's biggest Internet search and online advertising giant, has finally caved in to pressure from Rights Holders. The firm has announced a series of new measures that should remove, at least in part, the popular words (e.g. "warez", "torrent" etc.) and links associated with internet copyright infringement .

Google's Four Changes:

• We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours.

• We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete.

• We will improve our AdSense anti-piracy review [to prevent its use on websites that provide infringing material].

• We will experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results.

However Google admits that it can be "hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content". Rights Holders are also unlikely to be happy with how the new word filter only affects Autocomplete and not Google's wider database of sites.


Google has also pledged to improve its "counter-notice" tools for those who believe their content / website / webpage was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.

Measures like this could ultimately prove to be more effective than penalising broadband ISPs in the UK with an unworkable system through the controversial Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA).