RIAA: Google takedown numbers misleading
Google imposes an artificial limit on the amount of requests a copyright owner can make, which means the data it provides on infringing sites is off, the music industry group says.
The Recording Industry Association of America has claimed that Google's transparency report detailing takedown requests of copyright material is misleading, because the search giant limits the number of notices a company can make.
Google's statistics, since July 2011, show that Microsoft made the largest total number of takedown requests of any company, asking for a total of 2,544,209 URLs to be removed from Google's search results, which contained files or links to BitTorrent files that the company believed to be infringing on its copyrights.
The RIAA fell to third on the list, with 439,546 URLs targeted, behind NBC Universal at 1,054,843.
However, the RIAA believes that this score is misleading. The organization's executive vice president of antipiracy, Brad Buckles, wrote in a blog post this week that the data doesn't represent the total number of infringing Web sites found in Google's search results, because Google imposes an "artificial limit" on the amount of requests a copyright owner can make.
Read more of "Google fudges take-down numbers : RIAA" at ZDNet Australia.