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Google search takedowns top 345 million in 2014
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 6 January 2015
Google was asked to remove over 345 million infringing links from its search engine last year according to some maths done by Torrentfreak, which has gone through the weekly reports the web giant publishes. Assuming those figures are correct, that’s a 75% increase on 2013.
Under US law Google is obliged to remove from its search engine links to copyright infringing material if asked to do so by a copyright owner, and it has a system in place via which rights owners can issue takedown requests. Some companies and organisations now issue such requests on an industrial scale, the UK’s record industry trade body the BPI being one such group. Indeed Torrentfreak names the BPI as the most prolific takedown issuer of last year, having requested 60 million links be removed.
Torrentfreak notes that in 2008, before the content industries made takedown-issuing a routine part of their rights management operations, Google received a few dozen takedowns, whereas it now regularly removes a million links a day.
As noted in this article in a recent CMU trends report, while Google might point to the sheer scale of its takedown operation as proof it takes piracy seriously, many copyright owners would argue that the high number of takedowns being issued is proof that the web firm isn’t doing enough.
Many content companies reckon that Google should instigate domain-wide takedowns on sites that are prolific copyright infringers, and especially those that have been subject to web-blocking injunctions. But Google insists that takedowns relate only to specific URLs.
If Google were to start doing domain-wide takedowns, the overall number of takedown requests would likely decline. For example, Torrentfreak notes that over five million takedowns were issued last year for URLs associated with each of the following domains: 4shared.com, rapidgator.net and uploaded.net.
