Google aims to act more quickly against copyright violations

Pledges to speed up its response to take-down requests from rights holders

Google has outlined the actions it will take to limit online copyright infringement in a blog post by Kent Walker, vice-president and general counsel of Google Legal.

"As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringement of content. We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services," posted Walker.

"But as the web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we need to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem."

The company plans to build tools to improve the submission process and make it easier for rights holders to submit a take-down request for Google products - starting with Google Blogger and the traditional web search. Walker said that if this is used ‘responsibly', request response time will be reduced to 24 hours or less.

Further to this, Google will try to prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in its autocomplete tool, which completes a search specification after a user has typed a couple of letters.

"While it's hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we'll do our best to prevent autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose," added Walker.

Google also plans to improve its AdSense anti-piracy review, where it will be working with rights holders to identify violators making use of the contextual advertising solution.

These move come after the recent announcement that Google faces allegations that its search engine is acting in an anti-competitive way.