UK web users may soon find it harder to get pirated movies, music and TV shows by looking on the two main search engines Google and Bing after an announcement made today that the search engines have signed up to a voluntary code of practice that will demote websites in the search results if they host or link to pirated content and promote genuine websites that stream or download legally.
The code of practice has been created with the department of culture and sport along with the intellectual property office with . The new code will not replace current anti piracy measures which include getting court orders to block the sites with the ISPs which has been somewhat ineffective because the sites either register a new domain name for their website or web surfers use proxy’s to by pass the restrictions.
Although Google have signed up to the code they have said that they believe their existing anti-piracy measures are already effective, they allow the owner of copyrighted material to report a website that they believe is hosting their work without permission and then Google will demote the site in it’s search results based on the number of infringements that get reported.
As the announcement only appears to apply to the UK it would suggest that it will just apply to search results from Google.co.uk and bing.co.uk and that if users were to use other versions such as the .com or .de versions of the domains that they would get the unaltered results which means that people wanting to find pirated content won’t really be effected.