Having experienced a dreadful trial with Oracle, Google seemed to have become more sensitive than usual. Larry Page decided that it will be nice (I would say profitable) to play the Good Samaritan role and deliver free and daily information about online piracy. No doubt, Google as the major Internet search engine, receives more complaints about websites believed to be infringing on intellectual copyrights, notably on Microsoft's patents, than rival brands do.
Google Promises Daily Update About Piracy
Lately, Microsoft has strongly complaint about this kind of theft, so Google released this week a report to provide a better understanding of the intellectual property abuses on the Internet. All in all, about 97% of the copyright removal requests sent to Google were found to be valid, prompting the offending links to be blocked from its influential search results. The new report includes a breakdown of all requests Google has received since July 2011 to remove copyright-infringing content from its search index. Google plans to update the information daily and you will be able to find relevant results, if you type on Google's homepage one of the following words: transparency report, removals or copyright, you will be quickly directed to the link, that interests you.
If I were to exemplify this situation, I would say that Google has logged more than 2.5 million requests in the past 11 months to remove links believed to be violating somebody's copyrights. It turns out that Microsoft is, by far, the most copyrighted owner, since nearly 550,000 links were targeted month (out of a total of about 1.24 million), followed by the British Recorded Music Industry. Continuing this list, it seems that NBC Universal, the operator of several television networks and a movie studio, had its copyrighted content cited in nearly 1 million removal requests during the same period, meaning that's impossible one of those requests not to be true in the end. Another good example would be Recording Industry Association of America, which has railed against digital piracy since the rise of Napster's music-sharing service more than a decade ago, was finally identified as the copyright owner in more than 416,000 requests. Google's damaged owners top is completed by Universal Music or Sony Music.
Google Promises Daily Update About Piracy
Google decided to share those data, not because it was fearing about something as fierce as Oracle, it's also SOPA threatening a little bit its consciousness. Online infringements in US are currently covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires the content owner to police sites for violations and then send requests to take down the material. In theory, websites are required to respond promptly, although I doubt they do, let's not forget that a pirated content brings money and sometimes popularity in the end.
This is the first time that a major Internet company has made public the data on its response to takedown notices, so it makes you think whether the very data could have a big impact on the political scene. ACTA, SOPA, PIPA were all piracy bills in the end, but somehow they were treated as theoretical issues, now Google seems to prove that this subject can be treated as serious as it can be and customers will benefit of a clearer picture of how existing copyright protection measures are being implemented.
Google promises it will respond to any request within 11 hours, despite a rising volume of complaints, according to Fred von Lohmann, the company's senior copyright lawyer. The company wants to prove that it acts ethically and has revealed some interested data, as follows: Google sometimes receives more than 250,000 removal requests in a week, in the past month, it received 1.2 million removal requests on behalf of 1,000 copyright owners believing their content have been infringed by 23,000 different websites, Fred von Lohmann is confident that the current and future tracking technology will help Google solve these requests in real time. As you can imagine, the websites most frequently targeted in the copyright complaints were sharing ones, like filestube.com, torrentz.eu or 4shared.com. Curious enough, Pirate Bay comes on the thirteen place, which me wonder whether people pirate less on that site. It's not that ethical that Google didn't say a word about Youtube, in the end German court showed last month that things weren't that clear on Google's video platform. Not to mention that Blogger can update video contents, in this case these two own services have to be correctly analyzed.
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