The piracy penalty, which some are calling the Emmanuel Update, is set to be launched soon and will take a good look at how many take down notices you get for copyright infringement. There is already a list here: (list) in their transparency report of domains that have been issued with take down notices, and there are quite a few popular ones among the list as well.
There is a thread about it here at search engine land, but to sum it up, the update looks at the amount of take downs your site has and then drops your site ranking accordingly.
The way I see this is that its not just software etc. because there are a lot of warez sites on the list, but also content etc. So it would seem that the race is on to clear the web searches of just about every bad practice out there. Read the post, it is originally about how Youtube and a few select others might escape the penalty, but the information in the post is really interesting and eye opening.Google says the algorithm automatically assesses various factors or signals to decide if a site with a high number of copyright infringement notices against it should also face a penalty.
What do you guys think? Will this change the way things are done on the web?