*Via The Guardian and Plagiarism Today

“The Australian government has introduced new legislation that would expand the country’s site blocking initiative to possibly include search engines, forcing them to remove or demote allegedly infringing websites.

Under the current law in the country, rightsholders can petition the courts to order local ISPs to block access to websites that exist for the primary purpose of copyright infringement. However, Many rightsholders feel that it is inadequate as pirate sites are able to trivially get around such blocks with mirror versions of their site.

According to the government, Google, Yahoo, and other search engines support this process by making it easy for users to find either mirror websites or new pirate sites. As a result, they are proposing new legislation that will require search engines to demote or remove such websites, reducing their presence online and improving the strength of the blockades”.