According to Google's stats (see image above), the BPI - on behalf of its members - claimed exclusive rights to content in 162,721 URL removal requests in May until yesterday (Thursday 24).
As a result, the BPI are the second top copyright owner in the past month in terms of takedown requests. Microsoft is No.1.
The trade body has been open in asking Google to blacklist or de-prioritise file-sharing sites in its search results. The company has refused, but has agreed to act on individual URL takedown requests - thus the huge number.
Google says it has received 1.2 million takedown requests in total this month so far, from 1,000 copyright owners targeting 24,000 different sites.
While the data show takedown requests, it doesn't indicate how many of those requests actually lead to takedowns explicitly, although a blog post by way of explanation from Google does say, "We don't want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws so we've always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)."
It goes on to say, "At the same time, we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests.
"For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper's review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We've also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results."
On how Google goes about removing copyrighting-infringing links, Google said, "We believe that the time-tested "notice-and-takedown" process for copyright strikes the right balance between the needs of copyright owners, the interests of users, and our efforts to provide a useful Google Search experience.
"Google continues to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process. We already mentioned that we're processing more copyright removal requests for Search than ever before. And we're also processing these requests faster than ever before; last week our average turnaround time was less than 11 hours."
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