Google Removing Copyrighted URLs From Its Search Function

Posted on May 25 2012 - 7:31am by Editorial Staff

Google released a new edition of its Transparency Report stating that it is removing URLs from its search function over the copyrighter material. The stats say that Microsoft is the No. 1 complainer of copyright infringement, asking that a total of 2,544,209 URLs be removed. Google said it granted 97 percent of all requests between July and December 2011. NBCUniversal, RIAA, BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), and Elegant Angel pornographic film studio comes next after Microsoft.

“As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly,” Google’s senior copyright counsel Fred von Lohmann said in a blog post. “These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results.”

“We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason,” von Lohmann wrote. “As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of different proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.”

“Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws,” von Lohmann wrote. “At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why.”

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