Google today announced plans to disclose the number of copyright-related takedown requests it receives on a daily basis.
The search giant today released information dating back to July 2011 and said it will update the data every day. "The number of requests has been increasing rapidly," Fred von Lohmann, Google's senior copyright counsel, 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 its first report, Google revealed that in the past month, it has received more than 1.2 million requests to remove specific URLs from its search results from more than 1,000 copyright owners, which targeted more than 24,000 different websites.
The organizations that filed the highest number of takedown requests in the last month included Marketly, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), NBCUniversal, Takedown Piracy LLC, and DtecNet - which represent software, music, film, and adult firms.
The domains that were most-cited for copyright infringement include filestube.com, torrentz.eu, 4shared.com, zippyshare.com, and kat.ph.
The copyright data is part of Google's Transparency Reports. Back in 2010, it launched a website with information about the number of government inquiries Google had received for information about users or requests for Google to take down or censor content. Later that year, Google also unveiled a traffic tracking tool that let users see if traffic disruptions were due to technical issues or a government ban.
Google has faced criticism from copyright holders, however, over its efforts to remove pirated content from its search results. In late 2010, Google promised to implement stricter copyright enforcement, and by Sept. 2011, the firm said it had made "considerable progress" on those goals.
As part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), content hosting sites like Google and YouTube are generally not held responsible for infringing material on their sites if they respond promptly to takedown requests.
Today, Lohmann argued that the DMCA's "time-tested 'notice-and-takedown' process for copyright strikes the right balance between the needs of copyright owners, the interests of users, and our efforts to provide a useful Google Search experience."
At this point, Lohmann said, Google's turnaround time for responding to takedown notices is less than 11 hours.
Lohmann stressed, however, that not every takedown request is valid - some are done for anti-competitive reasons - requiring careful consideration of each complaint.
"For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper's review of a TV show," he wrote. "The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content."