MPAA “Optimistic” About Google's New Rules To Punish Pirating Sites

It’s not shutting them down as many in Hollywood would like but if a site is repeatedly posting pirated material then Google announced today that they’re going to flag it. “Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices received for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results,” Amit Singhal, the company’s SVP, Engineering wrote this morning on Google’s blog. Singhal added that “we’re receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009 — more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone.” Earlier this year at the AllThingsD conference WME’s Ari Emanuel emphasized that he wanted Google to start helping Hollywood out with piracy and “start filtering when people are stealing our product internationally.” The Motion Picture Association of America has long advocated Google and other search engines addressing the issue of piracy and copyrighted material and the accessibility of such material in search results. Today the MPAA’s Michael O’Leary had this to say about the new move by Google:

“We are optimistic that Google’s actions will help steer consumers to the myriad legitimate ways for them to access movies and TV shows online, and away from the rogue cyberlockers, peer-to-peer sites, and other outlaw enterprises that steal the hard work of creators across the globe. We will be watching this development closely – the devil is always in the details – and look forward to Google taking further steps to ensure that its services favor legitimate businesses and creators, not thieves.”

Related: Ari Emanuel Responds To Google On Piracy