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.
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.
