Google and Microsoft announced their commitment to strike down piracy sites from their search page results. The announcement from the two tech giants came on Monday.
Tech giants to take down piracy sites from front page search results. The tech giants will be making life a little bit more difficult for piracy sites and their users soon. In a new UK agreement, the companies will be working on their respective search engines so that searching for pirated media such as films, TV shows, and games will be more difficult for its users. This comes after accusations in the past of not putting in action to protect copyright holders' rights.
According to a report by the Telegraph, both companies have already started. The changes will be coming very soon.
Under the new set of guidelines to be implemented, the companies' search engines will be taking out all links to pirate sites from the first page of search results. The search engines' auto complete features will also be tweaked in accordance to these new guidelines, too. The tweak will involve removing known terms that could lead to or are related to pirate sites.
Google has been receiving lists of over a million websites reported to infringe on copyrighted material. However, the company chose not to act on the websites based on these reports alone. The tech giant will instead remove websites from the first pages of search results and slowly demote them further only if copyright takedowns against them are issued frequently.
Both companies have already taken down links after receiving requests from copyright holders. Google has taken down a total of 915 million links in the past year. Bing, on the other hand, has taken down over 91 million website links during the first half of the previous year.
The UK agreement was agreed upon on February 9 and set to take effect immediately. It aims to reduce visibility on pirate sites on the companies' search engines by June of this year.
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