Google has been asked to take down over a million websites: Including a ton of online pirating sites and The White House.
After years spent
attempting to clean the internet's murky waters, Google's latest transparency
report reveals it has now received takedown requests for over a million
different sites. With its individual URL removal request count now reaching the
billions, these new figures suggest that pirates now have more options than
ever when it comes to stealing digital cargo. The number of takedown requests
are up significantly from last year, thanks in part to copyright-holder's
increasingly widespread use of algorithms that automatically inform Google of
copyright-infringing content.
While the numbers
are staggering, it's hardly surprising that the world's most popular search
engine gets inundated with requests to remove illegal content from its search
results. What is unexpected, however, is that the report shows sites like The
White House and The U.S Department of Justice have had repeated requests to
remove their content. The U.S Government isn't alone though, with legitimate
sites like NASA, Netflix, the BBC and The New York Times also regularly making
the naughty list.
Some of these
baffling requests can of course, be chalked down to copyright software errors,
but interestingly, Google's transparency reports also expose governments that
are trying to censor certain content. With political articles and videos
regularly coming under fire from governments around the world, transparency
reports allow citizens to easily keep tabs on their government.
Other reports,
however, are less nefarious. A site that's no stranger to being unjustly
harassed by copyright holders is the movie database site, IMDB. Where most
legitimate sites get accidental reports in the dozens, In recent years the
popular movie page has had requests to remove over 1000 of its URLs.
Unsurprisingly, Google refused to remove the site's URLs from search results.
Still, the vast
majority of these copyright infringements can undoubtedly be linked with a rise
in piracy. With US internet service providers recently abandoning their piracy
warning system before the UK has even implemented the policy, it seems as
though making piracy sites harder to find is currently many rights' holders
best option.
Source: engadget
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