Google Europe Blog: copyright

Celebrating culture in Avignon

Monday, November 21, 2011

AvignonForum d’Avignon collecting societiespartnershipsChateau de Versaillesfeatured David DrummondThe Art ProjectPosted by Simon Morrison, Public Policy and Communications Manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Opening an Internet Research Institute in Berlin

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Institute for Internet and Societyfour distinguished university partnersHumboldt University

Birgit Grundmann

Alexander von HumboldtPosted by Max Senges, Google Policy, Germany

Making Copyright Work Better Online: A Progress Report

Friday, September 2, 2011

Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog In December, we announced four initiatives to tackle the problem of copyright infringement online. We’ve made considerable progress on each front, and we will continue to evolve our efforts in all four areas in the months to come.

Acting on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours. We promised to build tools to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and Web Search), and to reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less for submissions using these new tools. We built the tools earlier this year, and they are now being successfully used by more than a dozen content industry partners who together account for more than 75% of all URLs submitted in DMCA takedowns for Web Search. Our response time for these partners is now well below the 24 hour target. In the coming months, we will be making these tools available more broadly to those who have established a track record of submitting valid takedown requests.

Preventing terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. Beginning in January, we started filtering terms closely associated with infringement from Google Autocomplete, our feature that predicts search queries based on popular searches from other users.

Improving our AdSense anti-piracy review. We have always prohibited the use of our AdSense program on web pages that provide infringing materials, and we routinely terminate publishers who violate our policies. In recent months, we have worked hard to improve our internal enforcement procedures. In April, we were among the first companies to certify compliance in the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB’s) Quality Assurance Certification program, through which participating advertising companies will take steps to enhance buyer control over the placement and context of advertising and build brand safety. In addition, we have invited rightsholder associations to identify their top priority sites for immediate review, and have acted on those tips when we have received them.

Improving visibility of authorized preview content in search results. We have launched Music Rich Snippets, which allow legitimate music sites to highlight content in the snippets that appear in Google’s Web Search results. Rhapsody and MySpace are among the first to implement this feature, which has been developed using open web markup standards, and we are looking forward to more sites and search engines marking up their pages. We hope that authorized music sites will take advantage of Music Rich Snippets to make their preview content stand out in search results.

These four initiatives have been an important part of our work combating piracy these last several months, but we’ve been pursuing other avenues as well. We continue to believe that making high-value content available in authorized forms is a crucial part of the battle against online infringement. We have expanded our movie rental services on YouTube and launched the Google eBookstore, featuring a wide array of books from authors and publishers. We also continue to improve YouTube’s Content ID system to help more copyright owners (including song-writers and music publishers) to monetize their works and are working with WIPO on a rights registry that will help African musicians license their works. There is plenty more to be done, and we look forward to further refining and improving our processes in ways that help both rightsholders and users.

Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel

A new agreement to bring out-of-print French books back to life

Thursday, August 25, 2011

La Martinièrelast yearPosted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partnerships Development Manager, Google France

A simple way for publishers to manage paid access online

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Humboldt UniversityGoogle One PassFirst Click FreeFast FlipLiving StoriesAxel Springer AGTomorrow FocusStern.deLa PresseMedia GeneralPopular SciencePrisaRust CommunicationsOne Pass websitePosted by Lee Shirani, director, business product management, Google Commerce

Making copyright work better online

Thursday, December 2, 2010

(Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog)1 trillion unique URLsmore than 35 hours of video uploadedthinklaughlearn new things

We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours. We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and Web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we’ll improve our “counter-notice” tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.

We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.

We will improve our AdSense anti-piracy review. We have always prohibited the use of our AdSense program on web pages that provide infringing materials. Building on our existing DMCA takedown procedures, we will be working with rightsholders to identify, and, when appropriate, expel violators from the AdSense program.

We will experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results. Not surprisingly, we’re big fans of making authorised content more accessible on the Internet. Most users want to access legitimate content and are interested in sites that make that content available to them (even if only on a preview basis). We’ll be looking at ways to make this content easier to index and find.

Content IDPosted by Kent Walker, General Counsel

Un soutien solide a la culture française

Friday, November 26, 2010

SACDSCAMl’ADAGPBeaumarchaisBertrand Tavernierson discoursHachette LivresSociété des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musiquePar Christophe Muller, directeur des partenariats YouTube Europe du Sud, de l’Est, Moyen-Orient et AfriqueSupporting French cultureSACDSCAMADAGPPierre Augustin Caron de BeaumarchaisBetrand TavernierspeechHachetteSACEMPosted by Christophe Muller, Director of Partnerships for YouTube in Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa

A Big Win for the Internet

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Today a federal court in Madrid dismissed charges of copyright infringement against YouTube. This decision is a clear victory for the Internet and the rules that govern it. Spanish broadcaster Telecinco had claimed that YouTube should be liable when users upload copyright-infringing material.

The court rejected Telecinco’s claim, noting that YouTube offers content owners tools to remove copyright infringing content and this means that it is the responsibility of the copyright owner – not YouTube – to identify and tell YouTube when infringing content is on its website. This decision reaffirms European law which recognizes that content owners (not service providers like YouTube) are in the best position to know whether a specific work is authorised to be on an Internet hosting service and states that websites like YouTube have a responsibility to take down unauthorised material only when they are notified by the owner.

The law strikes a careful balance: it protects copyright owners’ interests while allowing platforms like YouTube to operate, making it possible – for example – for elected officials to interact with the public in new ways and enabling first-hand reporting from war zones.

This decision demonstrates the wisdom of European laws. More than 24 hours of video are loaded onto YouTube every minute. If Internet sites had to screen all videos, photos and text before allowing them on a website, many popular sites – not just YouTube, but Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others – would grind to a halt.

YouTube and other websites give artists the opportunity to reach wider audiences than ever before and make money in the process. At the same time, people gain access to a wealth of creative content. We believe that letting websites like YouTube thrive is in the best interest of artists, publishers and consumers who can all benefit from the opportunities offered by hosting platforms.

YouTube respects copyright laws and wants to ensure that artists, publishers and media companies succeed online. That’s why we built Content ID; our technology is designed to prevent copyright abuses and give owners control over their content. The owner of a video simply gives us a copy and tells us what to do with an unauthorised upload: remove it, place ads next to it, or simply let them know that it’s been uploaded. Over 1,000 media companies, including Lagardère Active, Channel 4 and RAI in Europe currently use Content ID. And in Italy, all major broadcasters but one are using these tools.

We have always been open to working cooperatively with rightsholders and continue to grow our number of partnerships with content owners and hope to be able to work with Telecinco in the future in the spirit of copyright protection, content distribution and new opportunities.

Posted by Aaron Ferstman, Head of Communications for YouTube - Europe, the Middle East and Africa

German Supreme Court rules that Image Search does not infringe copyright

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Google's aim is to help users discover information as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes the information they seek is in written or audio form, and sometimes the information they seek is visual - which may take the form of photographs, designs, artworks or other types of imagery - and we try to present the information in a way that best answers the user’s query.
With this in mind, we launched our Image Search service in 2003, which presents users with a selection of reduced-resolution thumbnail images relating to their search query. Users can then click through to the site that hosts the image to see it in full-size or to see the content around it. Millions of users find this service helpful - they can quickly find exactly what they want, and many site owners do too - it’s another means through which Internet users can discover their sites. Website owners have complete control over what Google will crawl on their site: with a simple set of tools called robots.txt they can notably tell Google (and other search engines) not to crawl the images on their site.
We are heartened by the German Supreme Court´s ruling today that Google Image Search does not infringe copyright. The case was brought to court by an artist who had uploaded photos of her work (large paintings) to her own website. She then claimed for copyright infringement against Google as the images were displayed in our image search results.
Today´s ruling makes it clear not just for Google, its users in Germany and all owners of websites containing images, but also for all providers of image search services operating in the country: showing thumbnail images within search results is legitimate and millions of users in Germany benefit from being able to discover visual information at the click of a mouse.
We still have to wait for the full reasoning behind the decision. What we know today: thousands of websites and companies in Germany will be able to benefit from Google Image Search in the future as well. News websites on the Internet, online providers of pictures and posters, artists, photographers, designers and many more who depend on the web for their livelihoods can go on using the service as a significant distribution platform.
Posted by Dr. Arnd Haller, Managing Counsel, Google Germany GmbH

Meeting the EU's 2020 challenge

Monday, January 11, 2010

EU2020 Communicationour contribution.

Bringing the world's lost books back to life

Monday, September 7, 2009

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Posted by Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director

Making the dream of digital libraries come true

Friday, August 28, 2009

detailEuropeanaevolution of new business models

Sharing Public Domain Books

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

(Cross-posted from the Inside Google Books blog)books.google.comannouncedBarnes and Noblehttp://books.google.comPosted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partnership Development Manager, Europe

Working with News Publishers

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

declaration

User-agent: *
Disallow: /<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">unavailable_after
Image: 'Robots wallpaper,' Jelene (Creative Commons Attribution)

Update on 7/20/2009: The word "crawling" in the fourth paragraph has been replaced with "indexing."

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

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