Google swamped with record-breaking takedown requests
Google is coping with a record-breaking increase of DMCA notices from copyright holders, who are targeting “pirate” sites on the search engine giant.
Google currently processes over 24 million links to copyright-infringing pages per day. According to Google’s Transparency Report, this is more than double the number of last year’s figures.
Five years ago, the search engine processed only 10 million takedown notices during the year. Today, it processes the same amount in less than a day.
As TorrentFreak predicts, Google will process more than a billion links this year, which is a hundredfold increase in just five years.
The graph below illustrates the steep increase of weekly DMCA takedown requests over a period of three years.
Source:Google’s Transparency Report
According to DMCA law, search engines must remove copyright-infringing links every time they receive an alert. New data shows that Google removes 91% of the reported URLs. Only 2% of the requests are rejected, while the remainders are either duplicated or incomplete links.
DMN reports that copyright holders such as major record labels are deliberately bombarding Google with ‘Robo DMCA’ notices. Google maintain that the DMCA is a sustainable anti-piracy law, however media industries are concerned that the DMCA provides a loophole for illegal piracy. As removed links can simply reappear under new URLs the following day, the major entertainment industry groups want Google to implement a ‘take down, stay down’ response.
“Every day we have to send new notices to take down the very same links to illegal content we took down the day before. It’s like ‘Groundhog Day’ for takedowns,” RIAA CEO Cary Sherman has said.
Google have previously rejected the ‘take down, stay down’ model, which has caused an influx of ‘robo’ takedown notices in a bid to overwhelm the search giant. However, various parties have protested against the use of robots, without any human review, arguing that automated takedown responses ultimately censor perfectly legal content.
In July 2016, Google implemented various other initiatives to fight online piracy. This included the down-ranking of pirate sites and promoting legal options in search results, all of which can be found in its revised “How Google Fights Piracy” report.