Google has just released the 2014 edition of its “How Google Fights Piracy” report – the second-ever such report issued by Google that documents their efforts to combat piracy amongst its various services. This includes YouTube, search results and its Google Play/Music services, to name a few.

Here’s what you need to know:

What are Google’s Anti-Piracy principles?

Create More and Better Legitimate Alternatives.
Follow the Money.
Be Efficient, Effective and Scalable.
Guard Against Abuse
Provide Transparency.

Google’s piracy solutions are premised on the notion that piracy happens when consumer demand exceeds legitimate supply. As such, the report argues that “the best way to combat piracy is with better and convenient legitimate alternatives”, citing Spotify, iTunes and, YouTube its Google Play services as examples of how to do this.

From the report,

“Each time a music fan chooses YouTube over an unauthorized source for music, it’s a victory against piracy—unlike previous generations of music fans who were raised on unauthorized sources for music, today’s young fans have YouTube as a legal, compelling way to experience music online. And because of our licensing agreements with our partners in the music industry, rightsholders are compensated when fans visit YouTube to experience music videos.”

[Obviously, that last statement is highly questionable, given the recent YouTube negotiations with independent labels for their streaming services]

The report is divided into sections, examining Google Play Music (essentially a description of the service), YouTube, Google Search and Ads – five areas where Google currently has anti-piracy strategies and mechanisms in place. Here’s the key data from each section:

YouTube:

More than 1 billion unique visitors visit YouTube each month, and they collectively watch more than 6 billion hours of video.
How much user-generated content do they create? More than 100 hours of video every minute.
Obviously, some portion of this user-generated content likely will contain some copyrighted content – so Google’s strategy (since 2007) has been their ContentID system, which not allows allows for anti-piracy measures (i.e. the ability to identify and take down copyrighted material) but also monetization (i.e. identify it, but leave it up and get paid).
More than 5,000 partners currently participate in ContentID – including record labels, movie studios and broadcast networks.
ContentID scans over 400 years of video daily, and more than 300 million videos have been claimed by ContentID.
How much reference material has been provided to ContentID by rightsholders? Currently, the database includes over 25 million active reference files.
How else, besides ContentID does Google deal with copyright issues on YouTube: their copyright policies, their Copyright Center and their Content Verification Program.

Google Search:

Out of the 60 trillion address on the Web, Google states that only an “infinitesimal portion of those trillions infringe copyright, and those infringing pages cannot be identified by Google without the cooperation of rightsholders.”
To do this, they use the provisions of the US’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides safe harbor from monetary penalties for copyright infringement for online services like Google, with these services expected to remove or disable selected items once notified that they are infringing copyright.
In 2013, they received 224 million DMCA removal requests – and ended up removing 222 million.
How quick is the turnaround? Currently, less than 6 hours.
Besides having links to certain sites removed from search results altogether, the amount of times this happens to any given site is factored into the rankings for its search results. Meaning? A page that regularly receives takedown notices will start to see its Google ranking suffer, and its pages (the ones that didn’t get removed) will be ranked lower and lower in Google search results.
Google has also taken some additional steps: making legitimate content sources more visible in search results and removing piracy-related terms from Autocomplete being the most prominent.

Advertising:
Their AdSense program is apparently actively rooting out any participants who are engaging in piracy – with more than 73,000 sites ejected from the program since 2012. These sites are then blacklisted from receiving any AdSense advertising in the future.
Google has also committed to stepping up its enforcement efforts on its DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business program to weed out any such rogue sites.

To see the full-report, click here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxyRPFduTN2NmdYdGdJQnFTeTA/view