Anti-Piracy campaign wins another fortress

Seems like anti-Piracy campaign is hitting and hitting hard against pirate websites. Earlier Demnoid was shut down by the authorities in Ukraine after suffering a massive DDos (Distributed Denial of Service attack and  today Google has written in a blog post that they are going to lower the rankings of the websites in their search results which are known to have violated copyright laws.

Google writes in its blogpost," Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily"


The search engine will soon take into consideration the number of DMCA takedown notices it receives against sites to determine the ranking of those websites in its search results. The more the number of notices received against a site, the lower it will appear on the search results.

Google's new algorithm based upon the notices from copyright owners will start working from next week. This step has given relief to the major anti-piracy companies MPAA(Motion Pictures Association of America) and RIAA(Recording Industry association of America) who had already asked major search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing to remove these sites from their listings.

Google further writes,"Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law. So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search results, we won’t be removing any pages from search results unless we receive a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner."