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Google begins to publish list of sites taken down for Copyright

by Alistair Lowe on 25 May 2012, 10:15

Tags: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

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For quite a while now, Google has been publishing figures of sites removed due government requests, however, the firm has now introduced detailed figures of firms that reported matters of copyright and who those rights belong to.

Google take-down requests

At the top of the list of copyright owners is Microsoft, who has had over 500,000 URLs removed in the past month alone, primarily from torrent indexing sites, no doubt relating to bootleg copies of Microsoft software products. Microsoft's take-downs were reported primarily by Marketly LLC, who has of course taken the top spot for largest reporter.

Somewhat disappointingly, Microsoft is followed by the British Phonographic Industry, who has been far more active than even the American content industries, focusing on sites such as filestube and 4shared.

It's also clear from Google's information, that the number of take-down requests per week has risen from 100,000 in October last year, to 300,000 last month, suggesting a year upon year rise of up to 600 per cent. We wonder just how much of the filling process Google has automated or if it manually reviews each request; whilst a few thousand requests per week isn't too extreme for a firm the size of Google, at growth rate of 600 per cent, these requests could become a serious resource drain in the coming years.



HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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1.25 million URL's requested to be removed - is that unique URL's or is it possible that there has been duplication with more than one company reporting the same sites?
KeyboardDemon
1.25 million URL's requested to be removed - is that unique URL's or is it possible that there has been duplication with more than one company reporting the same sites?

Unique URLs being a specific page, there is ofc less sites and often these removal requests are filed in a singe, related report.
That's insane! 1.25 million :O
The most interesting thing here, for me, is that the most targeted site has under 0.1% of the complaints. There are clearly a huge number of sites out there that people are trying to combat.
Interesting that you choose to use the word ‘culprit’ which has negative connotations under English law. I'd suggest that Microsoft are quite within their rights to protect their copyright.

Fair play to Google for handling this task efficiently. It's a hidden cost that they bear which I never appreciated before.