In depth: Google’s Simon Morrison on its new anti-piracy steps

This afternoon, Google announced a series of steps to work with rightsholders to tackle online copyright infringement, focused on its search engine and its AdSense advertising network. You can read the details here.However, Music Ally joined a conference call to brief journalists about the announcement, where further details were provided about what Google is doing, and why. Simon Morrison, copyright, policy and communications manager at Google EMEA took the call. Here are the key highlights.On whether this was in response to pressure from rightsholders“We talk to rightsholders all the time about these sorts of issues, and that has been raised… we're interested in helping creators because that helps us… We are taking a two-pronged approach to copyright infringement: you have to have good anti-piracy practices, and you have to create new business models and opportunities.We are doing a lot and working on more [for the latter]: we do things with YouTube, and have announced we're to launch Google Editions [for e-books]. If you make it easy for people to buy legal content, they are less likely to hunt down pirated content… We talk to content owners all the time, and we have heard the feedback. This is more about helping [...]