Microsoft honored 99.57% of 17m copyright removal requests last Q 2020

As an intellectual property company itself, Microsoft encourages respect for intellectual property, including copyrights. We also are committed to freedom of expression and the rights of users to engage in uses that may be permissible under applicable copyright laws. Links to webpages containing material that infringes on the rights of copyright owners may be removed from our search results provided we receive a legally sufficient notice of infringement from an owner or an authorized agent acting on that owner’s behalf. The following numbers relate to requests to remove links to webpages from our Bing search engine results.

Copyright removal requests, July to December 2020

 

Requests	URLs requested	URLs accepted	URLs rejected	Percentage of URLs accepted
17,006,978	59,222,175	58,965,071	257,104	99.57%

Note: The data above details compliant removal requests received by Bing for removal of algorithmic search results. The report does not include: (1) copyright removal requests from the Bing image or video index, (2) from Bing Ads, or (3) removal requests for other online services, such as Outlook and Skype requests, or (4) requests initially deemed non-compliant during preliminary reviews conducted prior to entry of the request into our standard tracking tools. The data includes more than 95% of the copyright removal requests for Bing for the six-month reporting period. Removal requests for Bing represent about 99% of all copyright removal requests received.

Source: Content Removal Request Report | Microsoft CSR

Does this show that people have no recourse to invalid removal requests unless they are willing to spend big money on lawyers?

Robin Edgar

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