The tech giant had to discard 9% of all allegedly infringing links rights owners asked it to remove from the search results in 2013. This is about 21 million URLs for which the company took no action, either because the requests were unauthorized or duplicated the ones submitted in prior notices. Over 25% of requests from NBC Universal, Fox and Lynda.com were discarded.

Within 2013, the rights owners have been increasing the number of DMCA takedown requests sent to Google. While two years ago the search giant was asked to remove about 10 million links, and 50 million in 2012, this year the notices nearly quintupled, making it 235 million URLs.

If you take a look at those requests, you can find quite interesting facts concerning the volume and accuracy of the notices received. Of course, the music industry was most active, with BPI and RIAA sending in requests for over 40 and 30 million links respectively. 20th Century Fox, Froytal Services and Microsoft follow them with 20, 19 and 10 million URLs.

Another interesting finding is that Google discarded about 9% of all takedown requests in 2013, as they were either inaccurate notices or duplicate links which have been already removed. The most “wrong” requests came from the BPI – more than 520,000 links (11% of the links they submitted in 2013).

Of all rights owners who submitted over 1 million URLs, Lynda.com had the highest percentage of discarded notices, as the company took no action for 57% of the links the company sent in. It is followed by NBC Universal and Warner, with Google discarding 28% and 25% of their requests respectively.

As for the RIAA, Adobe and BREIN, they were doing better, and the tech giant discarded only 2% of their requests. Google does its best to catch errors so it doesn’t mistakenly block access to non-infringing content. The company is putting substantial resources into improving the process to deter abuse.

On the other hand, rights owners think that Google should be more proactive about infringing websites. For instance, the Recording Industry Association of America previously asked the tech giant to start banning entire domains from its search results. Perhaps, the tension between Google and the entertainment industry will develop next year and the volume of DMCA requests will quintuple once again.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.