Copyright holders are more active than ever in protecting their content. According to file sharing news website TorrentFreak, the number of takedown requests received by Google this year has more than quadrupled.
After looking at Google's copyright related transparency report, TorrentFreak reported that Google received more than 235 million takedown requests in 2013 from copyright holders who wanted links to copyright infringing content removed from the search results. The takedown requests increased this year by more than four times from 2012 when Google received only 50 million requests. Only 10 million requests were made in 2011.
The most active in submitting links by far are the music industry's anti-piracy groups British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) which sent in removal requests for 41.7 and 30.8 million links respectively. Requests were also made by major media companies such as NBC Universal, Warner Brothers, Disney Enterprises and Fox.
Although the number of takedown requests surged, Google had discarded nine percent of them, because they were either inaccurate takedown notices or related to duplicate URLs that have already been removed, which means it kept alive 21 million URLs.
Online video tutorial website Lynda.com had submitted more than one million links to be removed but Google discarded 57 percent of the 1,178,809 URLs takedown requested. NBC Universal and Warner did not also fare well as Google discarded 28 percent and 25 percent of their notices respectively.
Copyright holders want Google to be more proactive with infringing sites. The RIAA has in fact asked Google to ban entire domains from its search results. "Every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. We are using a bucket to deal with an ocean of illegal downloading," Brad Buckles, RIAA executive vice president of anti-piracy, said.
Google, on the other hand, is careful to prevent copyright holders from abusing the system. "We still do our best to catch errors or abuse so we don't mistakenly disable access to non-infringing material. Google continues to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process, including into identifying erroneous and abusive takedowns, and deterring abuse," the company said.
