Building Ad Blocker Into Chrome Among Goggle's Anti-Piracy Efforts

Google efforts to fight online piracy include building an advertising blocker into the Chrome browser that filters ads from web pages that don't comply with industry quality standards, and recent launch of its Copyright Match Tool for finding near-identical re-uploads of creator videos on YouTube, the company said Wednesday. It said it has launched multiple initiatives to provide legitimate alternatives as part of search results. The five principles in its anti-piracy efforts are creating "convenient, legitimate" piracy alternatives; "rooting out and ejecting" pirate sites from its advertising and payment services; using scalable copyright removal processes; guarding against false infringement allegations; and providing transparency. It said search isn't a major driver of traffic to pirate sites, and search can't eradicate pirate sites, while whole-site removals "are ineffective and over-censor content." The company reported YouTube paid $3 billion to rights holders for video content, and October 2017-September 2018 it paid $1.8 billion in advertising revenue for the music industry. It removed 3 billion URLs from search for infringing copyright.