GOOGLE HAS RELEASED new information about requests for links to be removed from the search giant’s results on the grounds of copyright infringement.

The data shows that Google receives more complaints concerning breaches of Microsoft’s copyright than anything else, with requests for the removal of over half a million URLs concerning Microsoft copyright in the past month.

In total, Google received 1,246,713 requests for URL removals last month which were related to 1,296 different copyright owners.

In a post on the company’s official blog, Google’s senior copyright counsel Fred von Lohmann said that the information concerning copyright was being launched as part of Google’s Transparency Report.

“We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason,” he wrote.

“For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly.”

These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites.