The company said the websites, who violate copyright norms will be punished. In a recent blog post, Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google engineering stated that Google will begin taking a new signal, considering valid copyright removal notices in its ranking algorithm, so that users can be directed to legitimate content easily. The company revealed receiving removal notices for more than 4.3 million URLs over the last 30 days. This sudden growing figure has surpassed all the notices the company received in all of 2009. It is believed that search engines play a difficult role in the battle against piracy, as they index but get no part in hosting pirated content on sites across the Web. Google and other search engines were earlier accused of not doing much to keep pirated sites out of search results by many people who support strong action against copyright violators. As filtering out legitimate and illegitimate information would take lot of time, it was difficult for search engines to tackle the problem. However, this recent move from Google seems to be a step that can sink the pirate websites. Still, this move drew rapid concern from Public Knowledge, which is the digital rights group. John Bergmayer, senior staff attorney revealed a statement in which he said that the system initiated by Google could be misused by those who want to sink competitors’ sites and may harm sites that host a lot of content. He added, “Google needs to make sure this change does not harm Internet users or the Internet ecosystem.” However, the Motion Picture Association of America welcomed the decision and said hoped that Google’s actions will help guide consumers to many legal ways, with which they can access movies and TV shows online.
