Google will not counter its philosophy on piracy: Schmidt to Hollywood

Even while the relationship between movie studios and Google changes, an almost defiant Eric Schmidt has made it clear that it will not be deleting alleged pirate websites from its search results.

In an informal press meet held on Thursday, the chairman of the Internet company has emphasised that Google will not be policing the web. “The industry would like us to edit the web and literally delete sites, and that goes counter to our philosophy,” said Schmidt.

Google will not change its philosphy

He stressed that Google is going around helping to make changes to reduce piracy, but it will not delete websites. Accompanied by Senior Vice President and Chief of Business Officer Nikesh Arora as well as Senior Vice President Salar Kamangar, Schmidt said that Google has been doing much to combat piracy. “It is an absolute fact that there are pirate sites and we’ve done things to reduce the amount of people who use them,” Schmidt said. “Our position is that somebody’s making money on this pirated content and it should be possible to identify those people and bring them to justice.”

The company has already been removing piracy related terms from its Instant and Suggest services, but copyright holders want Google to go a step ahead and completely remove infringing domains from the search results.

Acccording to Arora, Google has shut down 82,000 AdSense users that were found infringing on content owners’ rights in one way or the other and this looks like the path the Internet giant will be taking to tackle this issue in the future too.