Google 'must step up piracy fight'

The Government is calling on search engine giant Google to do more to combat online piracy, as well as clamp down on unlawful content.
The call comes after Google agreed to pay a $500m fine for taking ads from rogue online Canadian pharmacies – and assisting them through AdWords – in violation of US federal law. Last year, the company was also forced to remove 3,500 ads a week in the UK alone, which the OFT found were linked to scams.
Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is expected to tell the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention today that search engines and other web businesses must “make it more difficult” for piracy sites.
“We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Neither should we tolerate it online,” Hunt will say in his speech.
“We intend to take measures to make it increasingly difficult to access sites that deliberately facilitate infringement, misleading consumers and depriving creators of a fair reward for their creativity.”
The Government also wants search engines to use everything in their power to penalise web sites whose content is ruled unlawful.
Google was forced remove 93,360 fraudulent ads during the second half of 2010 – equivalent to over 3,500 a week – after the Office of Fair Trading claimed they were linked to scams.
Last month, the company admitted that it “improperly assisted Canadian online pharmacy advertisers to run advertisements that targeted the United States through AdWords”. In addition to the fine, Google agreed to several compliance and reporting measures “to insure that the conduct… does not occur in the future”.