From New Europe, a chart of the alarming increase in web link takedowns forced on Goggle in the name of “intellectual property”:
From New Europe:
The search engine has published on its latest transparency report that the number of requests made by rights holders to remove content has doubled in the last month.
Those copyright holders have the right to demand websites that are infringing their rights, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is a law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
According to the report, Google received 1,5 million URLs per week, the double than four weeks ago. On 2011 and in the same month, Google received only 131,577 requests.
During this four weeks, the company fielded requests from rights holders and anti-piracy bodies to remove 5,7 million URLs from its search results. From them, more than 31,000 are specified domains, 1,845 are copyright owners, and 1,376 belong to reporting organisations.
