14 DAY TRIAL // Copyright owners continue to complain that Google isn’t doing nearly enough to combat online piracy. Data shows, however, that in the past three years, the company has been asked to remove half a billion copyright-infringing URLs.
TorrentFreak went back and checked out the Transparency Report numbers since they were first released three years back and found that in the lapsed time there have been requests covering about 500 million links to allegedly infringing webpages.
Over the past few years, the number of requests Google receives has increased dramatically as copyright holders hope that flooding the company with DMCA takedown notices will solve the problem of online piracy.
While back in 2008 Google was receiving a few dozen notices the entire year, now it has ended up processing about 1 million each given day. The numbers continue to increase at a rapid pace. More importantly, about 240 million of the 500 million demands were submitted during the first months of 2014.
Google has removed most of these, including about 2 million Pirate Bay pages that no longer appear in search results and will continue to take down the various links it is asked to if it finds it acceptable.
The music and entertainment industries, however, are not pleased with Google at all. They’ve been slamming Google every chance they have, acting like this is the only way people get access to illegal content.
500 Million and counting
The British music industry group BPI, which signed the requests covering about 20 percent of all URLs that Google has had to look into over the past few years, wants Google to do more to lower the visibility of unauthorized content.
“Despite its clear knowledge as to which sites are engines of piracy, Google continues to help build their illegal businesses, by giving them a prominent ranking in search results,” BPI complained.
They are ignoring, of course, the fact that most pirates don’t use Google to get their content, but rather access the homepage of the sites directly and use the internal search options to find what they desire.
Needless to say, there’s no way to get anti-piracy activists to understand that perhaps it would be more efficient to redirect the money spent on companies that put together the lists with infringing links towards better purposes, such as figuring out how to deliver content to users in an easily accessible manner and for a reasonable price. As many have pointed out so far, since all music is sold digitally nowadays, and there are less production costs, the prices shouldn’t be as high as they are.