The search giant removed more than 900m links to pirate sites last year. This is almost double the year before. Despite Google’s efforts to downrank pirate websites, it still has arguments with copyright owners over the methods used.


Every single day, Google is bombarded with DMCA takedown notices that list links to pirated content. They are largely sent by the music and movie industries and target thousands of piracy websites.

Over the past year, anti-piracy groups asked the tech giant to delete more than a billion links to allegedly infringing material, which is almost twice as much as 560m Google received in 2015. Google’s Transparency Report now reveals how many of the requests were satisfied and actually deleted: nearly 90%, which results in 914m removals. Overall, copyright owners targeted links on 351,000 different sites. As for the copyright owners, the British music group BPI was one of the most active ones, filing over 80 million requests. The list of the top senders includes Microsoft, Fox, NBC Universal, and HBO.

The number of DMCA requests has steadily increased over the past few years, but this year might be different. According to statistics, their number hasn’t increased over the second half of 2016, and the number of weekly takedowns was about 20 million.

However, the copyright holder groups ask Google to conduct extensive revisions and don’t want the search engines to be protected by safe harbor provisions. For example, they are calling for adopting a “notice-and-stay-down” policy to make sure that reported content doesn’t pop up elsewhere after being removed once. In response, Google argues that the current system is sufficient for dealing with infringing content.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.