On Friday evening Google announced their latest penalty in 2012, being touted as the 'Pirate Penalty'.

Starting this week, Google's latest signal in their search algorithm will be targeting the number of valid copyright removal notices received against websites.

"Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results" Google said in its blog post announcing this update.

In the past two years Google have been receiving much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online. 

Google cannot determine whether a particular website is or is not violating copyright law; only copyright holders know if something is authorised, and only the courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed.

Presumably this means YouTube is going to suffer?  Yeah, right...