This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Digital Labels & Publishers
Record industry’s Google takedown frenzy passes 200 million mark
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 11 May 2015
The record industry has passed the 200 million mark in its Google takedown frenzy, which is pretty impressive given it only passed the 100 million point in January 2014.
Not that record label trade groups like the UK’s BPI and America’s RIAA get too many kicks out of such stats. As previously reported, the industry associations now submit takedown notices on an industrial scale to Google, each requesting that links to unlicensed recordings be removed from the web giant’s search engine. But while Google does enact such takedown requests, the record labels would like the firm to be more proactive, for example removing entirely all links to websites that have been labelled rampant copyright infringers by the courts.
Noting the recent landmark takedown stat, a spokesperson for the BPI told Torrentfreak: “The fact that BPI and RIAA have together removed 200 million illegal results from Google demonstrates just how much more needs to be done to clean up search”.
While noting the European Commission’s previously reported digital single market initiative, the spokesperson continued: “If the digital single market is to unlock growth, consumers need be directed to legal sources for entertainment ahead of the online black market”.
Google has, of course, made some alternations to its mysterious algorithms in a bid to demote unlicensed sources of content, the most recent of which, the BPI admits, were a “positive step”. But the trade group adds: “If further progress is not made swiftly to ensure that searches for entertainment content yield overwhelmingly legal results – for instance by boosting the ranking of known licensed sites for appropriate types of search – then the new UK Government and the EU Commission should intervene to make that happen”.
