Google take down notices getting out of hand

Big content is effectively censoring Google in a way that the Chinese goverment can only dream of and no one appears to be stopping them.

Google’s transparency reports show that requests to remove links to copyrighted material rose steadily in 2013. The search giant received 6.5 million requests during the week of November 18, 2013, which is over twice as many as the same week a year ago.

Google is proud of the fact that it complies with 97 percent of requests.

According to TorrentFreak, “copyright holders have asked Google to remove more than 200,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine this year”.

That means that Google is now removing nine allegedly infringing URLs from its indexes every single second of every single day.

What is probably more alarming is that most of the requests are automatic and most of the Google decisions about taking them down are too. They are a good way for Hollywood to shut down rivals or enforce its own copyright policy largely free from having to go to court.

Google does not release figures of “false positives” these are situations when takedown notices were issued when there were no rights to do so.

Such cases involve people like Microsoft issuing accidental takedown notices against its own pages. Or cases where copyright was not infringed, or belonged to other people.