Over the past couple of years, copyright holders have been battling piracy, and they are flooding Google with numerous takedown requests.
It's no exaggeration — Google receives a whopping 65 million DMCA takedown notices on a monthly basis to remove "pirate" pages, and when the numbers are crunched, they total to about 2 million a day or 1,500 per minute.
Google has been the recipient of such requests for years, but back in 2011, the company only had to process hundreds a day. Going over to August 2014, takedown requests shot up to one million per day, and going back to the present, it's nearly doubled.
Based on Google's transparency report, more than 5,500 different copyright owners are asking the company to remove over 70,000 specified domains, amounting to more than 65 million links entirely in the past month. (Take note that the figures on the statistics change periodically.)
Reported links with confirmed pirate content are timely removed by the company, but considering the volume, it's just not that easy to process every one, not to mention that some faulty and duplicate requests are likely in the mix.
Last year, Google rolled out a fix for the issue, greatly changing up its search algorithm to downrank websites that have received multiple copyright infringement notices. As a result, huge torrent sites have become less visible on the search engine, but numerous streaming websites still remain as part of the top results.
Both Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) suggest that Google is too lenient on offenders, saying that the worst of the worst should be blacklisted completely. The company, however, disagrees, saying that such censorship would be going too far.
As of now, it seems that Google will have to continuously accommodate this massive tidal wave of takedown requests until every conflict is resolved between the organizations.
