The team at Google might have their work cut out for them when it comes to copyright takedown requests. The company announced on Sunday that it now faces upwards of 2.5 million notices a week.
In comparing today’s numbers, the company says only 250,000 requests per week were being made six months ago.
Google began its copyright removal program to ensure that original works were protected and spam posts were deleted from its system.
In a company blog post on its policy by the numbers blog, Google’s Legal Director, Fred Von Lohmann, reveals that Google takedown requests have increased by ten fold since the service began.
Google’s Legal Director also revealed that takedown numbers will be downloadable through the company’s Transparency Report and that new requests are being added daily. The Transparency Report includes the total number of URLs being removed for each site, each request made, overall removal rates, and URLs not acted upon by the company’s copyright standards team.
Google has a pretty strong track record for removing requests. According to its blog post, Google has removed 97.5 percent of all URLs listed in its copyright removal requests.
At this time, Google takes six hours to process each request, and infringing websites with multiple violations face significant search ranking hits.
As the internet becomes a bigger playground, the number of monitors on the ground continues to increase and will likely continue to increase well into the future.
Do you think Google is acting in a responsible manner by processing so many copyright infringement notices?
