The War on Internet Piracy
Big tech companies like Google clash with media companies over copyrighted material.
This article is for subscribers only.
Most people never think about the quiet war raging to keep copyrighted photos, videos and songs off the Internet. But it has emerged as one of the contentious issues dividing big tech companies like Google on one side and entertainment, music and media companies on the other.
Millions of times each week, Web companies are trying to keep pace with Disney films uploaded on YouTube, digital music that pops up repeatedly online or snippets of Wall Street research notes posted on Twitter. Just for Google's Web search engine, the number of requests to remove links to copyrighted materials has exploded from a few hundred thousand Web addresses each week in 2011 to more than 20 million a week now, according to Google data.