incrediBILL - 6:11 pm on Aug 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

perceived to be biased in favor of the popular brands or websites.

From an outside vantage point anything popular would appear to be favored but I'm sure the bias is from the masses searching for those popular brands, not Google promoting them directly.

Even Amazon was once just a little unknown online merchant.

Anyway, back to the DMCA topic, I normally take the little guys offline by filing a DMCA with their host, not Google. Many scraper sites have never come back from the dead so I never really worried about their SERPs after I found them initially and will probably continue to address the issue in that way moving forward unless I find myself at odds with some bigger fish.