"Given its importance as a starting point for many users, removal from Google's index can have devastating consequences on speech," EFF activist Parker Higgins wrote in the post. "As with [Google's] government transparency reports, reporting on copyright notices can expose bad practices and allow people to assign blame where it belongs: with the people abusing the system.

The 3% of cases where Google refused to comply with takedown requests represents a large number in absolute terms, Higgins said. Each of those, are instances of legitimate speech that would have otherwise been shut down, he said. "Google deserves to be commended for that behavior."

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

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