Google slammed for ‘inadequate’ piracy response

The House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has heavily criticised internet giant Google's efforts to combat piracy, describing them as "inadequate" and "derisorily ineffective".

The condemnation of Google's attitude to preventing the infringement of intellectual property rights online is delivered as part of the committee's Supporting the Creative Economy report. This examines intellectual property rights in the UK, as well as the Olympic and Paralympic legacy, and creative hubs, among other areas.

In the report, the committee said: "Google cannot claim ignorance over the scale of illegal activity on the internet. At present, the BPI alone sends Google well in excess of 2 million notices per month relating to individual pages on sites which encourage and promote large scale copyright infringement."

The committee said Google was "notable among technology companies" in its failure to adequately respond to requests from the creative industries to prevent Google search results from directing consumers to copyright-infringing websites.

Referring to the search industry as a whole, the report said: "We are unimpressed by their evident reluctance to block infringing websites on the flimsy grounds that some operate under the cover of hosting some legal content. The continuing promotion by search engines of illegal content on the internet is unacceptable. So far, their attempts to remedy this have been derisorily ineffective."

The committee added it did "not believe it to be beyond the wit of the engineers employed by Google and others to demote and, ideally, remove copyright infringing material from search engine results ... [in the same way they] block child pornographic content from search results," adding the company had provided "no coherent reason" it could not do this.

It was also suggested, during the evidence gathering hearings for the report, that Google has significant influence in the halls of power.

Viscount Younger of Leckie, the intellectual property minister, told the committee: "I am very aware of [Google's] power, put it that way. I am also very aware, I think, that they have access, for whatever reason, to higher levels than me in No. 10, I understand."

However, Google strongly rejected the committee's criticism.

In a statement to IT Pro, a Google spokesperson said: "We removed more than 20 million links to pirated content from our search results in the last month alone. But search is not the problem - according to Ofcom just eight per cent of infringers in the UK use Google to find unlicensed film and 13 per cent to find unlicensed music.

"Google works harder than anyone to help the film and music industry protect their content online," the statement concluded.