Rights holders have already requested the removal of more than 10 billion pieces of content from Google citing copyright infringement – it turns out from the browser’s current transparency report. The milestone is understandably not celebrated by the search firm, but the number shows an interesting trend of how the subjects of requests have changed over the years.
In addition to legitimate websites, search engines also constantly display pirated websites, which is not a new problem. At the beginning of the 2000s, when BitTorrent took off, search engines unwittingly began to function as gateways to websites offering various pirated content. This is when copyright owners began to request a large number of takedown requests from Google to remove problematic links from the search index, citing the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
However, the number of requests to remove URLs pointing to infringing content has increased dramatically over the years, and the company has now processed more than 10 billion requests in total. In 2016, this number was still close to one billion, then the exponential growth curve finally flattened out, and around 2017 the number of removed links started to decrease.
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Since Google automatically gives a lower rating and less visibility to sites suspected of piracy, it has also become more difficult to find infringing content. As a result, Google has already processed fewer takedown notices over the years. Last summer it was possible to record a total of 7 billion removal requests, after which the numbers jumped again. The company currently handles an average of roughly 2.5 billion removal requests per year, a new record.
Put into numbers, this means more than 50 million removal requests per week, roughly 5,000 per minute.
The subject matter of the affected sites also shows a shift: in the beginning, they mostly reported torrent sites, which were later replaced by various hosting sites and streaming portals. Studies published around 2013 even showed that music companies were the most active when it came to takedown requests, with publishers and their representatives accounting for over 40% of all takedown notices. The situation is quite different today, as the publishing industry accounts for more than half of the URLs reported this year.
Source: www.hwsw.hu
