Google Gets 358,000 Takedown Requests a Week

Google has released its transparency report showing that it received 1.24 million copyright take-down requests in the last month, mostly by copyright owners Microsoft and NBC Universal.

Fred von Lohmann,Google's senior copyright counsel, wrote on the Official Google Blog

As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites. 
However, von Lohmann does say that Google has ignored some "erroneous or abusive" removal requests, saying that a major entertainment company wanted Google to take down a link to a newspaper review of a television program (we would have to assume it probably wasn't positive). Since there was no infringing content, Google didn't honor the request.
 
Google says it's taking an average of 11 hours to deal with each request, which begs the question -- is that all overtime? Or does Google keep a team of people on 24/7 to deal with these 358,783 requests a week? Either way, that's a lot of dedication for someone else's copyright.
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