Google has announced new measures aimed at cracking down on digital piracy. The online giant has promised to remove material that breaks copyright laws from its search engine 24 hours after its been reported.
"Services we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago – iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, and many others – help us access this content and let traditional and emerging creators profit from and share their work with the world," Kent Walker, general counsel for Google, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "But along with this new wave of creators come some bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright."
The measures not only apply to Google's search service, they will also impact the company's popular video sharing site Youtube.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) praised Google's steps to crack down on illegal content and to better comply with the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That legislation criminalizes the dissemination of copyrighted material online.
"We are encouraged by Google's recognition of the responsibility of all participants in the online world to help combat online content theft. These are important first steps toward helping protect the rights of content owners and the more than 2.4 million American jobs that depend on a healthy motion picture and television industry," Bob Pisano, president and interim CEO, said in a statement.
Those warm words are a departure for Hollywood, which has long claimed that Google did not do enough to discourage internet piracy.
In addition, Google will now implement changes to its Autocomplete function, which predicts what users are looking for before they finish typing in their search.
Google will likewise make improvements to its ad service Adsense to try to prevent its advertisements from showing up on sites that offer pirated content.