Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what progress has been made on giving intellectual property rights holders an opportunity to discuss with search engine providers how to maximise the prioritisation of sites with legitimate content.

Since October 2014, my noble Friend the Minister for Intellectual Property Baroness Neville-Rolfe has chaired 4 roundtable meetings between representatives of the creative industries and leading UK search engines.

The meetings have been focused on discussing steps that can be taken to reduce the number of consumers led to copyright infringing websites through search results.

Work continues, but during this period the group has seen a substantial improvement in the way some of the most infringing sites are dealt with in search rankings.