A new milestone has been marked in the requests that Google receives for blocking pages from its search results that violate intellectual property rights. Blocking is done in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and with public disclosure of requests for public oversight.
According to published statistics, the number of unique second-level domains mentioned in removal requests has exceeded 4 million. The total number of URLs claimed for removal is approaching 6 billion. The requests mention 317 thousand copyright owners and 321 thousand organizations on behalf of which the claims were made. The highest number of blocks affects sites like 4shared.com (68 million), mp3toys.xyz (51 million), rapidgator.net (42 million), chomikuj.pl (34 million), uploaded.net (28 million), new-rutor.org (27 million).
Since many requests are submitted based on automated analysis, there are often instances where claims are made to remove legal content. For example, in over 700 thousand requests, there are demands to remove links to materials from Google.com itself, in 5,564 requests to remove links to materials from IMDb.com, and in 3,492 requests for articles from Wikipedia. 22 requests point to violations on the FBI website, 17 on the White House website, two on the website of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and three on the Vatican's website. Typically, Google identifies such errors, and they do not lead to the actual exclusion of pages from search results.
Among the curious situations, one can also note Warner Bros' addition of its own website to the block list, attempts to block torrents with OpenOffice and Ubuntu 8.10 ISO images by Microsoft, blocking IRC logs and discussions in mailing lists for Ubuntu and Fedora under the pretext of unauthorized distribution of the film '2:22', as well as reports from the continuous integration system of Ubuntu under the pretext of unauthorized distribution of the film 'Result'.
Source: opennet.ru
