Google doubles down on copyright complaints for YouTube clips

Google is opening up more channels for fielding copyright complaints about YouTube videos, thanks to a change in how the company monitors Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)takedown requests via web search.

Yesterday, Google announced it is tweaking its web search to take into account the number of DMCA takedown notices a website has received.

These notices are used to tell a website copyrighted material owned by another party is being used somewhere on the site and that the copyright owner would like it taken off. Google, whose highly-ranked search engine results drive tons of traffic to websites every day, will push websites with too many DMCA takedown notices lower down the search results page.

The search company, which owns YouTube, already takes into account complaints submitted via YouTube. YouTube has its own request form that is not connected to DMCA requests. If your content was stolen and posted to YouTube, you can go to this link and YouTube Copyright Center, choose whether you are a content owner or a regular YouTube user, and file a complaint there. The center also provides copyright educational materials.

In a phone chat with Google, we learned the new web search-driven takedown calculations will also apply to YouTube, effectively giving the parent company two channels for monitoring copyright complaints about YouTube clips.

YouTube image via Rego – d4u.hu/Flickr