How Google Fights Piracy 2014 Report

Last month Google issued their annual report highlighting how they are contributing to the fight against piracy.  The report details their efforts and focuses on the advances made. If you’d like to read the full report it is available here, but here are some of our favorite highlights:

Good Explanations of why Google de-listing is important:

In addition to removing pages from search results when notified by copyright owners,
Google also factors in the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any
given site as one signal among the hundreds that we take into account when ranking
search results. Consequently, sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear
lower in search results. This ranking change helps users find legitimate, quality sources of
content more easily.

A list of top TCRP programs with an appearance by yours truly:

A promise of more effective action against frequent violators:

In October 2014, we have improved and refined the DMCA demotion signal in search
results, increasing the effectiveness of just one tool rightsholders have at their disposal.
As outlined earlier in this report, rightsholders made good use of our removals process
to target sites sites that they have not authorized to distribute content and have sent us
hundreds of millions of removal requests over the last year.

For some this is old news, but we were waiting to see if Google would live up to their promises. We are happy to report that so far they have with many prominent torrents reporting large  cuts in their Google traffic. We applaud Google for their efforts and hope this is a sign of things to come.