Year after year there has been an increase in the number of copyright requests and Google wants users to know that it is serious about such requests. Till date around 1.76 billion websites have been removed from Google search results due to copyright requests.
While the number of copyright takedown requests rejected by the company is around 40 million which is just 2.1 percent of the total number of requests, another 16 million requests were found to be duplicates.
The process of submitting a copyright request is simple –
A copyright request must be sent by the owner of the copyrighted content. Upon receiving the request, Google will review it and if no issues are found it will go ahead and comply. The owner of the de-listed content is sent a notification and they have the option of further pursuing the matter by filing a counter notification in one of two ways – first they can present an argument against de-listing or they can remove the infringing content.
Once this process is over, Google has the ultimate decision on whether or not the URL should be indexed and shown in search results.
Till date Google has received more than 20 million copyright takedown requests. For a more current estimation of the numbers you can visit the copyright section of Google’s transparency report here.
