As more and more digital content is exchanged and transmitted through online media, much of it faces the risk of being pirated, imitated, and even copied in large quantities for improper profit. Fred Von Lohmann, Google's Director of Copyright Law, further explained that Google often adjusts its services internally to address such issues, while also collaborating with external organizations to curb the spread of pirated content and even help users download genuine, high-quality content.
Taking the recently popular "Pokémon Go" as an example, Google's Director of Copyright Law, Fred Von Lohmann, explained that if different developers create gameplay similar to "Pokémon Go" but do not infringe on the copyright of related image, sound, and other content, such as the self-made game "Monster Community" by the Taiwanese team Rain-Project, the two games will basically coexist on Google Play.
However, if someone deliberately copies the game content completely, or even uses obviously infringing content, or places content in the App that affects user rights, Google will stop it through the reporting mechanism and remove the content. If the offense continues, Google will block the developer account to prevent infringement.
YouTube can use the Content ID mechanism to proactively scan content for copyright infringement. It also offers a more diverse copyright protection model by allowing copyright holders to decide whether to request the removal of infringing content or to generate revenue by adding advertising to infringing content. This approach does not affect the development of secondary creations of audiovisual content, and avoids interfering with the production of various innovative content under established laws.
Google Search cannot replicate YouTube's anti-piracy model, which mainly eliminates it in a passive way.
However, due to the extremely diverse and complex content on online platforms, Google has basically no way to eliminate pirated content through methods similar to YouTube Content ID, or to allow copyright holders to increase additional revenue. It can only help eliminate it in a relatively passive way.
Fred Von Lohmann, Google's copyright legal director, explained that the current common method is to first determine the user's input keywords through the underlying computing mechanism, and then estimate what kind of content the user hopes to find through Google Search. In the search results, websites with mainly genuine content are displayed first, and websites involving pirated content are sorted to the back, thereby reducing the exposure of the content of such problematic websites and indirectly reducing the spread of pirated content.
However, regarding online phenomena such as content farms, Fred Von Lohmann stated that due to Google's position, it is difficult to define the copyright ownership of original works. Therefore, the operation mode of such websites must rely on users and copyright holders to report them. Google will block them from earning revenue through Google's advertising mechanism, while lowering their online rating to avoid exposure in Google Search results.
However, if users still insist on searching for pirated content through Google Search, although Google cannot restrict it by filtering keywords, it has already begun to promote the display of legal download content in Google Search search results in some regions to reduce users' willingness to download pirated content.
Fred Von Lohmann believes that many users download pirated content simply because they don't know how to find legal content. Therefore, by increasing the exposure of legal content, reducing the exposure of pirated content websites, and even blocking the profit opportunities of pirated content, the problem of online piracy can be further curbed.
