Google is getting more removal requests than ever, growing at a huge rate

Dec 13, 2012 15:02 GMT  ·  By

Google has been making efforts to be as transparent as possible when it comes to data and removal requests. It started with government and law enforcement requests and expanded to copyright related requests this year. Google is now improving on the idea.

For one, all the data is now downloadable so anyone interested can simply grab all of it and peer through the hundreds of millions of takedown requests.

Google is also providing more info on how many of the requests it approves. To date, 97.5 percent of the URLs provided as linking to infringing content have been removed.

There are also some worrying stats on copyright-related removal request. Six months ago, when it started reporting this, Google was getting 250,000 removal requests per month. In that time the number has grown 10 times, it now gets 2.5 million requests every week.

Google has also gotten better at processing these requests, it has to if it wants to be able to keep up, a request is processed on average in about six hours. The problem is that the company still looks through all of them to weed out abusive or incorrect requests, as much as possible.

As you can imagine, this is a losing battle. And as copyright holders increase the number of requests they make, more and more problems will arise. But Google can't do much about if it wants to maintain its business relations with old media.

"As policymakers evaluate how effective copyright laws are, they need to consider the collateral impact copyright regulation has on the flow of information online," Google's legal director Fred Von Lohmann wrote.

"We’ll continue to fine tune our removals process to fight online piracy while providing information that gives everyone a better picture of how it works. By making our copyright data available in detail, we hope policymakers will be able to see whether or not laws are serving their intended purpose and being enforced in the public interest," he added.