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Who Sends Google the Most Takedown Notices? Microsoft
nk497 writes "Google has released details on the copyright takedown notices it's received over the past year, and the most requests by far have been from Microsoft. Over the past year, Google has received DMCA takedown notices for 2,544,209 URLs over Microsoft-related piracy, with NBC and the RIAA ranking second and third. Many of the reports do not come directly from companies such as Microsoft, but via firms set up only to chase copyright issues. The most popular targets appear to be file-sharing sites. 'These days it's not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009,' said Fred von Lohmann, Google senior copyright counsel, adding it takes on average 11 hours for Google to take action."
Must be an odd position to be in where your competitor can take down the main thing you do. Ok, infringement obviously needs to be taken down quickly, but I can see there being a huge issue here later.
Is there something that matches this in Bing? And if there is, wonder how quickly Google will take down pirate apk sites.
Ok, had to pause a moment there. Doing a search for;
"free pirate android apps"
on google/bing produces wildly different results as you'd imagine. Wonder how this will go.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Who knew they were so protective of Bob and Clippy?
The DMCA seems broken. No one can possibly deal with all those notices. They'd have to use an automated system or have an inconceivable amount of manpower on their hands. To top it all off, there are bound to be mistakes.
Copyright enforcement is just scary.
The real business case is no longer the software. As the article says, there are now dedicated companies who chase copyright issues. If they cannot find a copyright issue, they'll go bankrupt. If they find more copyright issues than last year (and win a few lawsuits), they'll make profit.
I guess that soon enough, we cannot change the copyright laws anymore, because the copyright-chasers would lose their revenues.
It's interesting how many of these requests are received, but I couldn't easily find out how many of them were declined. Does anyone have a link to this information? It seems a bit surprising if there are not a single false positive in all those millions of requests. Is it the case that once someone asks for something to be taken down, Google cannot decline, even if the request is wrong?
Korma: Good
Of course not. The goal is less about taking down the sites and more about burning Google's resources through excessive takedown requests. Google ought to queue the requests in a FIFO pipe and process a small number per day. Maybe they could require payment for the processing, which does cost Google real money, to offset the time and resources wasted.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Hey! On a related note now there is a list of all file sharing domains in one place: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/?r=all-time - neatly organized.
... US-style.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
These days it's not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009
In that case, they'll win the war any day now.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
why isn't there a google alternative that is worth a damn, that isn't in the US, isn't hosted in the US and doesn't use a US-controlled TLD, and thus, not subject to this DMCA bullshit?
..to just not index any page containing the term Microsoft? Just add it to the stopword list already.
That's 11 elapsed hours, not 11 hours to do the work. They have a backlog. Each one might only take five minutes to process, but they'll get to it, on average, 11 hours after it's reported.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Computers nowadays don't come with a Windows CD. So if a virus messes up my computer, what am I to do?
I have always downloaded a Windows ISO off the Pirate Bay, which I do with an entirely clean conscience, since I own a valid Windows Key, which Microsoft also checks when I actually install windows. Websites like the Pirate Bay is what makes it actually a tiny bit user-friendly to use Windows, in spite of Microsoft.
Google is just a search engine. Shouldn't the take-down notices be sent to the website host instead? Let search engines just do what they are intended to do, which is locate content.