Jeremy Hunt calls on Google and others to help tackle online piracy

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has called on internet search companies to play a bigger part in combating the illegal hosting of copyrighted content by removing results for such sites from search indexes.

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt told attendees at a Royal Television Society event in Cambridge on Wednesday that search firms such as Google and Microsoft can no longer ignore their responsibilities.

"We need to explore all the options to make life more difficult for sites that ignore the law," he said.

"I believe these could include ... a responsibility on search engines and ISPs to take reasonable steps to make it harder to access sites that a court has deemed contain unlawful content or promote unlawful distribution of content."

Hunt did not mention Google by name but, given the firm's dominance in the UK search market, it is likely that the minister is looking at Google to lead the way in the fight against illegal content.

A spokesperson for Google said that the company already works hard to remove content that infringes copyright when such content is brought to its attention.

"Without a court order, any copyright owner can already use our removals process to inform us of copyright infringing content and have it removed from Google Search," the spokesperson said.

"We recently announced a series of measures that make this process even easier, bringing our removal time down to an average of four hours."

V3 contacted Microsoft for comment, but had not received a reply at the time of publication.

Hunt also said that advertisers, credit card companies and banks have a responsibility to remove their services from infringing sites to present a united front in the battle against copyright infringement.

Hunt's stance was welcomed by Lee Myall, UK regional director at ISP Interoute, who said that it is high time other internet stakeholders played their part in curbing the growth of sites hosting illegal content.

"With new rogue web sites constantly surfacing, it is only right that responsibility for dealing with it is shared in the industry," he said.

"This new approach recognises that it is more than just the ISPs involved in this battle, and acknowledges the huge part that Google and others can play to combat this issue."