Google to Lay the Hammer Down on DMCA Takedown Violators

interesting...

Complete BS. Obviously it will not apply to Youtube, let's see if Vimeo gets eliminated from results! There is no transparency at all with this so no one knows how heavily this will be weighted as a ranking factor.

Despite Google not being the only search engine, I've got a feeling that since it -is- so huge, many others will just follow in Google's footsteps in relation to this issue.

YouTube and so many user-generated sites get around this with the excuse that "It was a user who uploaded it! It doesn't matter that our servers are holding it, promoting it, and playing it for everyone, and that we know this will keep happening ever minute". It doesn't matter that it's their sites who get the majority of all DMCA takedown notices.

What if the smaller players just started modelling their sites on the user-generated ones? And upload the content as if it was just a user, and when they get a DMCA, they take it down, and just re-upload next week.

So basically Google announced another way people can do negative SEO. People here hate them yet still don't mind giving them money (adsense, adwords).