In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law. That law makes it a criminal offense to circumvent digital rights management (DRM), which protects copyright on the Internet.
Sites like Google didn't really start enforcing the law, though, until around 2006, but since then the site has taken down over a billion percent more links since the law went into effect. This is due to the fact that copyright holders now have software that can search for links (generally for pirated pieces of software, music and video) at a faster rate, meaning that more links get reported.
TorrentFreak reports that, on average, Google gets around 100,000 links reported each hour. And that is twice the amount that the site received around this time last year. The site estimates that next year will see an even more drastic increase in reports.
"Data gathered by TorrentFreak from Google's Transparency Report shows that the number of links reported in DMCA notices has more than doubled compared to last year, and quadrupled in comparison to the year before," writes TorrentFreak on its website. "March 2014 Google was asked to remove roughly six million links per week, growing to eight million in 2015 and a whopping 19 million last week."
Although some of the links reported aren't violating the DMCA, most are. This means that Google stays busy in taking down links pointing to websites related to piracy, but the company still feels that it manages to stay in line with the requests it receives.
"We process more takedown notices, and faster, than any other search engine," Google told TorrentFreak. "We receive notices for a tiny fraction of everything we host and index, which nonetheless amounts to millions of copyright removal requests per week that are processed, on average, in under six hours."
However, the search engine does not go so far as to remove domain names, something most would argue supports censorship, although copyright holders argue that sites that infringe should be barred from Google's index.
One might believe that spending so much time and effort on these takedowns is useless, because it seems that for every copyright-infringing site, two more spring up in its place. Many might see Google's success in taking down links as a sign that the DMCA works, but most would probably just think it's counter-productive to waste so many resources on what is, essentially, a pointless endeavor.
