Google search is one of the chief sources that internet users utilize to find data. In the past, the company has been nagged by content creators repeatedly so as to force it to remove copyrighted content. The search giant has now reported that currently, it receives 2.5 million copyright removal requests each week!
Google started sharing statistics regarding the takedown notices it receives. This information was posted publicly by the company so as to give its users a glimpse as to which governments, organizations and companies are sending these takedown notices and what is the nature of the content that they want removed.
The company started the initiative only six months ago. Back then, it was getting nearly 250,000 removal requests regarding copyrighted content each week. Flash forward six months and now, the company is receiving a whopping 2.5 million copyright removal requests every week!!
This surge in the number of requests should be quite understandable. The content producers have made sure in the past that they would rather dish out millions of content removal requests to different websites and in doing so, are even willing to accidentally taken down the wrong web pages.
Many of the copyright enforcers are using automated software to send out these requests, which often ends up targeting such websites which don’t infringe any copyrighted content. What is rather alarming is that Google seems to be siding with these requests.
According to it, “Between December 2011 and November 2012, we removed 97.5 percent of all URLs specified in copyright removal requests.” Regardless, what is of most significance to note here is that with millions of weekly search results being purged simply because of alleged copyright infringement, we may soon be looking at an organized curb at the freedom of speech online, a prospect which is certainly not very welcome.
Source: Google
Courtesy: The Verge
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