“Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site,” said Google SVP of engineering Amit Singhal in a blog post. He went on to say, “Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.”
Perhaps the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its safe harbor provisions are impacting Google’s policies in more ways than believed possible early on given the company’s previous stance on access to copyrighted information.
Source: InformationWeek.com “Google Joins Copyright Police” August 13, 2012