Google has revamped its Transparency Report and released a new edition on Thursday, May 24, showing who is requesting URLs be removed, who owns the copyrights, as well as all the targeted domains since July 2011. Everything that is being removed is reportedly copyrighted or pirated material, mainly from software and entertainment companies.
The search giant launched its Transparency Report two years ago, aiming to show the world what data was being collected and what its various services had to offer. Before the new edition, however, the available information consisted only of government requests to remove content and disruptions in Google's search engine traffic patterns. Piracy and copyright issue were not included. The new edition released on Thursday has added a copyright section to Google's Transparency Report.
Removing Millions of URLs
According to the new edition, Google has received millions of requests, and Microsoft is the top complainant of copyright infringement. The software giant has asked Google to remove a total of 2,544,209 URLs. Microsoft was followed by NBC Universal, RIAA, BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), and Elegant Angel adult film studio. According to Google, the company granted 97 percent of all requests from July through December 2011.
"As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly," Fred von Lohmann, Google's senior copyright counsel, wrote in a company blog post on Thursday. "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 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results."
Copyright Removal Notices
Requests for products other than Google Search are not included in the stats, noted Google. The company also added that it plans to update the numbers on a daily basis, add a removal notice in the search results, and share all copies of copyright removal requests with nonprofit organization Chilling Effects, which collects such notices. According to Google, once a URL has been removed the user responsible can submit a counter-notice if they feel the removal request was not legitimate.
"We're starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason," von Lohmann added in his blog post. "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." There are many sites targeted by such removal requests, including torrent sites such as Torrentz EU, The Pirate Bay, and KickAssTorrents, online locker services such as 4shared, and others.
'Willfully Blind'
"It's wrong for Google to be willfully blind to the clear data it has that particular sites are massive copyright infringers," said BPI chief Geoff Taylor, as cited by the BBC. "When Google has been told 100,000 times that sites like The Pirate Bay and beemp3 distribute music illegally, why do they come top - above Amazon and iTunes - when I search for 'download music'? It's irresponsible, it misleads consumers and if Google won't sort it out voluntarily, Government should get on with doing something about it."
"Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don't want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws," explained von Lohmann. "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."
