Google Removes 8 Links Per Second for Copyright Violations

Lawbreaking links are vanishing before your very eyes at Google -- to the tune of almost 30 links gone by the time you've finished reading this sentence, give or take a second.

At a rate of nearly nine per second, Google removes URLs from its searchable database of Web pages -- you know, the things you Google -- at the request of copyright holders who inform the company that the links are to verboten content, like pirated movies, according to The Guardian.

In the last week of September alone, some 5.3 million links were removed from the search engine, the company said in its transparency report.

That's an increase of over 4,000 percent in a little over two years, according to the newspaper.

Only a few hundred thousand takedown requests were received by Google in summer of 2011 -- a figure that passed the 1.5 million mark in fall 2012, and passed 4.5 million weekly requests by April of 2013.

According to the Guardian, copyright holders seeking to help their bottom lines by refusing free content to Internet cheapskates are barking up the wrong tree.

An analysis by the London School of Economics found that "evidence does not support claims about overall revenue reduction due to individual online copyright infringement," the newspaper reported.

In the UK, revenue from online music surpassed that from record sales in 2013, the newspaper reported -- and despite the proliferation of movies online, global film revenues are also increasing.