Google’s Transparency Report shows that Google was asked to remove over a billion links over the past 12 months and has complied with copyright holder requests 90% of the time. TorrentFreak crunched the numbers and found that Google was asked to remove 1,007,741,143 total links from 945,000 different domains. TorrentFreak says that a total of 908,237,861 links were deleted.

The music industry dominated the take down requests, with over a quarter billion over the last 2 years by BPI, which represents the UK’s recorded music industry. Nearly 98% of url’s reported by this organization were removed.

The contention is that music “doesn’t just happen,” it’s an investment. A recent report by IFPI, Investing In Music, details the significant investment of the music industry (particularly record labels) make in creating hit songs and popular artists. The report says that music companies invest US$4.5 billion annually in discovering, nurturing and promoting artists. It’s no wonder they are actively fighting illegal sharing of their product.

File sharing sites were the biggest targets of the removal requests: