Google is making some significant changes to how it handles copyright infringement complaints and piracy that will go into effect over the next several months.

Google says it will act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours, will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in its Autocomplete feature, will improve its AdSense anti-piracy review, and will experiment to make authorized preview content more readily available in search results. 

In late June, Google announced that it had won its long legal battle with Viacom. The court decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of  the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement.

Time and time again, people have shown that Google is just as capable of tracking down copyrighted songs as sites like the Pirate Bay, and it’s seemed inevitable that the music industry would confront the search giant sooner or later.  Only now, Google’s cut to the chase by pursuing a small label called Blue Destiny Records.

Google is used to coming under fire from different groups when it comes to its Google Books project. Most recently, the fire has come from the China Writers Association, which has over 8,000 members.

The group complained that Google was scanning and uploading its books without permission from authors. According to a Bloomberg report:

Those who have been following the search industry for some time, may recall that Google had some legal issues with the (former) magazine Perfect 10 (nsfw). The company, which ceased publication of its magazine, but still operates on the web, has issued a press release saying that its five year battle with the search giant is "about to heat up."

Justin.tv has just announced a new copyright protection process it is initiating. The site is working with Vobile to filter content on Justin.tv using their database of content.

The Associated Press has announced it is taking measures to protect its online content with a creation of a news registry to tag and track all AP content "to assure compliance with terms of use."

The AP says the system will register key information about each piece of content it distributes as well as terms of use of that content, and feature a built-in beacon to alert the AP about how the content is used.

Because copyright and trademark lawyers have had such itchy trigger fingers when it comes to issuing DMCA takedown notices, there’s a lot of confusion out there what exactly constitutes infringement, and what webmasters can and can’t do with intellectual property.

Part of the problem is that websites hosting other people’s content—YouTube, Blogger, eBay, etc.—remove the content at the slightest whiff of a DMCA notice to avoid trouble. This leads, of course, to abuse and to targets without any great recourse.

The specious arguments made and overly harsh penalties sought by the copyright (Big Media) industry would be comically absurd if systemic corruption didn’t immediately transform them into tragedies.

One thing’s for sure, Google doesn’t want to be associated with pirates; the company has enough copyright troubles as it is in its battles with Viacom and the AP. But defenders of The Pirate Bay argue there is precious little difference between two engines both capable of retrieving existing .torrent files on the Internet.

Well, if Google (or any number of other cost-conscious corporations) isn’t going to do something about overreaching copyright enforcement, it may be up to nonprofits and legal scholars at our best law schools. First up, a pair of acronyms, next Congress for encouraging them.

If you happen to come across some silent YouTube videos today, there’s no need to start investigating your speaker settings and browser defaults.  It seems that the "problem" is on YouTube’s end; the site’s owners have chosen to mute certain clips as a way of dealing with copyright violations.