Google is upgrading their procedures for the submission of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices against copyright infringing materials on their services and also the procedures for filing counter notices. The dreaded DMCA notice is a common event on YouTUBE, especially for new users making music videos by compiling together popular music and clips from movies—or, in the case of clear infringement, uploading entire movies. The use of these notices is an important tool for copyright holders to protect their intellectual property from random distribution and Google is a powerful distributor of content.

TechCrunch has a bit of a commentary right now on how Google intends to update their policies,

Google says it is receiving a growing number of copyright requests to take content down and will now act on these requests within 24 hours. The search giant has actually built tools to improve the submission process for DMCA requests, particularly with Google’s blogging platform Blogger and search portal.

On the flip side, Google has improved its “counter-notice” tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed. Google has also updated autocomplete in Google search to prevent terms that are associated from privacy to appear in the search box.

The curious part of this quote come at the very end with the commentary on autocomplete—details on exactly how Google intends to do this currently are sketchy. However, seems like the search-giant is putting themselves in the odd position of identifying keywords that will be likely to reveal pirated content (and less natural content) and then not having the autocomplete suggest them? Well, at least autocomplete isn’t a necessary and fundamental part of searching the Internet—i.e., people will still be able to get the terms in and results will still come back, it just won’t suggest things that might lead to possible pirated materials.

The updates, according to the article, will focus at least partially on Blogger, Google’s blogging platform.

The DMCA and the battle for the protection of intellectual property on the Internet often catches innocent parties in the broad strokes some of these corporations paint when they go in, hewing with legal resources. It’s good to see that Google has improved its counter-notice tools. Although they’re responding to take-down notices in less than 24-hours, people who have had their content taken down wrongfully suffer damages (their content is not visible to potential consumers) while their content is down. So I hope this means that Google will also respond to counter-notices within 24-hours.

The ongoing struggle over how to handle copyright infringement and piracy in the information age and on the Internet continues to produce victims on both sides. Hastening the advantage and use of tools for people affected by either event should help clear the air a little, but it’s clear that tools on the content search and publication side will not shore up the breach.