What Google isn’t telling you about it’s latest change.
9 AM on Monday I got a call from smartcompany for a story on Google’s DMCA ranking change. In case you haven’t heard, Google announced over the weekend that it would now consider the amount of “valid copyright removal notices” it receives for a site. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a nasty piece of US legislation that was lobbied for by corporate copyright owners. Google of course cannot remove the content from the offending site but they can remove the offending page from turning up search results for a given phrase. If you’ve ever seen the image below while doing a search then Google has removed some results.
I really wasn’t that concerned at first as you will see from the interview. I could see some potential alternate news sites becoming casualties with the change but nothing to really concern business. Then I saw this.
Google tells us they had 4.3mil requests in June for content removal, what they don’t tell us is that is 3 times as many as the previous month or about 5 times as much as Janurary as this Reddit thread points out. This is an extraordinary growth in “valid copyright removal notices” which happens to coincide with Google introducing it as a signal in the algorithm. When you look closer, one of the main subitters of these notices is a company called Degban Ltd which calls itself a “multimedia copyright protection company” As Dave Gorman points out in his blog, he got hit with what is a presumably “valid copyright removal notice” from Degban that turned out to be completely erroneous. As Google states in their blog, it’s not for them to make a judgement on the content, just whether they’ve had a “valid copyright removal notice” and it would seem their growth at the moment is exponential. I know Google employs over 50,000 smart people but I could see how this change could easily be gamed to hurt businesses in highly competitive spaces. Love to know if anyone has heard of any new pressure being brought to bear on Google with copyright infringement. The timing of Google’s announcement, to me seems more than a little odd. Watch the show for more and leave some feedback if you have it!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
