Google pledges to fight music piracy – for a price

Google is to change its search results and advertising formats to help fight online piracy.

The tech company pledged to "demote" links to pirated content and instead provide links promoting legal alternatives such as Spotify or Beats Music.

In theory, this means that users searching for "Radiohead album free" or "Miley Cyrus torrent" will be directed to legal alternatives rather than illegal torrent sites or peer-to-peer networks.

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The catch is that the company is not going to do it entirely free of charge. Links to legal music services will appear at the top of search results in the form of paid advertising slots, encouraging companies to buy them.

However, Google will also adjust its search algorithm so that illegal links are pushed down, which should mean that the legal alternatives naturally float to the top.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said that it "broadly" welcomed Google's changes, but said that the service should not come at a price.

"There should be no cost when it comes to serving consumers with results for legal services," a spokesman told the BBC. "Instead we have urged Google to use the machine-readable data on the Music Matters website, which lists all services licensed in the UK, and to promote these legal services above illegal sites and results in their search, using appropriate weighting applied fairly and equally across services."

Google has long been criticised for not doing enough to help combat illegally downloaded entertainment.

In a report coinciding with the announcement of the new measures, the company reemphasised its long-held view that piracy is at least in part the fault of publishers. "Piracy often arises when consumer demand goes unmet by legitimate supply," the report said.

"As services ranging from Netflix to Spotify to iTunes have demonstrated, the best way to combat piracy is with better and more convenient legitimate services."