Google has revealed plans to target the internet’s “bad apples” with four changes it will implement over the course of the next year.

Kent Walker, General Counsel, said the action is directed at the "bad apples who use the internet to infringe copyright”.

“As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content,” he wrote. “We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we are working to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem."

That’s why, he says, Google has announced four changes it will implement over the next several months:

We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours.

We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we’ll improve our “counter-notice” tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.

We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete.

While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.

We will improve our AdSense anti-piracy review.

We have always prohibited the use of our AdSense program on web pages that provide infringing materials. Building on our existing DMCA takedown procedures, we will be working with rightsholders to identify, and, when appropriate, expel violators from the AdSense program.

We will experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results.

Not surprisingly, we’re big fans of making authorised content more accessible on the Internet. Most users want to access legitimate content and are interested in sites that make that content available to them (even if only on a preview basis). We’ll be looking at ways to make this content easier to index and find.

“These changes build on our continuing efforts, such as Content ID, to give rightsholders choice and control over the use of their content, and we look forward to further refining and improving our processes in ways that help both rightsholders and users,” Walker concluded.