In the face of sustained pressure from music and movie copyright holders to co-operate with the anti-piracy fight, Google has just published a report in its defence. Called “How Google Fights Piracy“, the report is a direct response to criticism leveled against the search engine giant, which claims that its unwilling to work with organizations focused on protecting copyright. Google points to three examples of how its doing its part to combat pirates, firstly with its claim that it provides “better legal alternatives” to piracy, primarily through YouTube and Google Play.

Fred von Lohmann, Google’s legal director, emphasized this point in a blog post accompanying the report:

“Each time a music fan chooses YouTube or Play over an unauthorized source, for example, it’s a victory against piracy,” stated von Lohmann,

Google second argument was that it had disabled its ad services to over 46,000 websites in the last year as punishment for violating copyright laws, while it also pointed to the vast amount of spring cleaning it does on its search engine in response to DCMA takedown requests:

“During 2012, copyright owners and their agents sent us removal notices for more than 57 million web pages. Our turnaround time on those notices was, on average, less than 6 hours,” noted von Lohmann.

Also noted in Google’s report were those responsible for sending those requests – at the top of the list was the RIAA, which sent Google a total of 8 million DCMA requests in 2012. It was followed closely by the British Phonograph Industry (BPI), which might not be as well known as the RIAA, but is every bit as prolific, sending just over 7 million requests.

Interestingly, the BPI went further than the RIAA and singled out the notorious Pirate Bay website for a takedown request, asking Google to remove its home page from Google’s search results altogether. Google’s response? An uncompromising no – as Torrent Freak explains, the search engine giant maintains a policy of only removing pages that contain or link to infringing content. This means that while Pirate Bay’s search result pages don’t show up on Google, its homepage does meet its standards, and is therefore not excluded – much to the annoynace of the BPI, which requested it be taken down 171 times.

Google gave the following response to justify “no action taken”:

“Number of URLs specified in this copyright removal request that we did not remove because we did not find the specified copyright infringement; we already reviewed the URLs in a previous request; or the URLs were malformed or otherwise led to an error.”

However, Google did remove 2,055 URLs as requested by the BPI, which gives it a leg to stand on should the BPI or anyone else argue that it advocates piracy in future. Even so, the BPI and its friends are unlikely to be happy with anything else other than Google directly manipulating its search results to push sites like Pirate Bay out of the limelight, as the RIAA makes pretty clear:

“Despite having received the notices of vast claimed infringements specified above, the sites in question continue to appear in the top 10 search ranking results for searches for an mp3 or download of popular tracks or popular artists.”

Perhaps those legitimate sites out there would be better off learning some basic SEO, rather than waiting for Google to block offenders from appearing in the top ten – something that it clearly doesn’t intend to do. But no matter what Google does, bar bending over backwards and doing whatever the RIAA and BPI asks, its support for anti-piracy efforts is likely to come under question. Google’s report states, “sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results,” something that will almost certainly provoke questions as to why ‘may’ isn’t ‘will’.