Google Tackles Piracy by Removing Millions of URLs

Cnet: As part of a new Transparency Report, Google has released new statistics about websites it removes from its search engine results for copyright reasons. In the past, the Transparency Report has included only information about government requests to remove links; the latest report also provides data about requests from copyright holders to remove links that contain pirated material. The organization that makes the most requests is Microsoft, which has asked that Google take down 2,544,209 URLs since July 2011.

“As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly,” blogged Google’s senior copyright counsel Fred von Lohmann. “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.”