Jun 8, 2012
Google on a war-path with Piracy
Mass piracy and copyright violations are a pitiful trend of the Web nowadays. Even internet giants like Google and Microsoft suffer losses because of it. However, they do not confine themselves to only complaining. The fierce fight against copyright infringement has been set by Google, which has by removed millions of URLs from Search.
Google’s Transparency Report was launched two years ago, giving users information on the services and accessible data.
The report featured specific government requests concerning the removal of potentially illegal data from the Search, as well as information on the copyright owners. The requests are mostly filed by software companies. The number of removal requests and the amount of removed URLs are growing rapidly; the average is around 300,000 Search link removals per week, with 97 percent requests satisfied.
This number means Google removes about 1.2 million links per month, yet this is not the peak. The number 1 complainant from more than 1000 copyright owners is Microsoft, urging to delete 2.5 million Google’s URLs, twice more than in 2009. Then an entertainment company NBC Universal Media comes with 986000, Recording Industry Association of America – 416000, British Recorded Music Industry – 335000, and even hardcore adult film studio Evil Angel – 84000. The overall amount of websites targeted by Google is 24000 by May 2012.
The global war on copyright infringement has busted out and is spinning up now. However, the most influential actors of the web support openness and call for signing a petition against SOPA and PIPA. This opposition has been joined by Mozilla, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Wikipedia, and many more.
