Google Explains its Stand on DMCA

Source:betanews.com

Google has made available a new version of its Copyright Transparency Report to the public. This will enable users to have a look into the countless URLs that have been reported for violation. Also contained in the report is the reason many URLS that were reported will not be removed by Google with one of the reasons being that there are simply an abuse of the DMCA.

Recently, copyright holders have bombarded Google with DMCA notices for links that they claim are in violation of privacy rights.

The requests rose at alarming rate from the few dozens it used to be far back in 2008 and now to a million of requests on daily basis.

It was in order to clarify issues that Google made the report available for people to make search within 2012. They also showed the rise in volume of the requests of DMCA that Google has received to take down the links in question.

Just some days ago, Google released a retouched version of its Copyright Transparency Report that contains more data on what is actually going on.

Source:torrentfreak.com
Source:torrentfreak.com

Previously, the only way to keep track of the number of URLs that has been submitted to Google was by hand, but with the new report, such information can now be found on the report. With the data available in the report, it shows that more than 1.75 billion URLs have been alleged to infringe on privacy rights since the counting began.

Also included in the report are the URLs that were submitted to Google and were not taken down from the search index with the reason for it.

From the reports, it could be seen that in last year notices submitted, more than 10% of the URLs that were submitted were not taken down. Half of that number which is about 50 million representing 5.5% were duplicated links that had been reported previously. 15 million (1.6%) out of the number were termed “invalid URLs” which included typos and other contents that did not exist. 31 million out of the number were rejected for various reasons.

3.4% of the number represented links that were victims of errors and abuse. In the report, different types of abuses were listed, and this included anti-piracy group’s coffee hatred which was first reported by TorrentFreak.

From the report also, Google highlighted cases of impersonation from anti-privacy outfits who posed as genuine people to mark links for removal without obtaining authorisation.

Google said it hopes that with the report they just released, people will be better informed on what content should be marked as infringement, adding that it will continue to add examples of what should be reported as infringement.