Yesterday, Google announced an initiative: “Making Copyright Work Better Online”. Google announced that in the coming months:

• They expect to reduce the average answer to legitimate takedown notices to less than 24 hours.
• In order to balance the two sides of the equation, Google will enhance the “counter notice” procedure that allows users to contest a takedown notice. Google does not give any details on the foreseen enhancements. The “counter notice” procedure of DMCA safe harbor is rather complex.
• The autocomplete feature should ban any suggestion that would favor piracy. Make the following experiment. Type in the Google research bar HARR. I got as 8th suggestion “Harry Potter 6 streaming”. Of course, it pointed to MegaUpload. That should not happen anymore.
• Violators of copyright will be baned form AdSense.

It will be interesting to monitor this initiative in the coming months.