14 DAY TRIAL // Google seems to be working overtime just to handle all the link removal requests it receives every day. In fact, things have gotten to a point where the company gets about 1 million such demands per day.
The trend proves that the music and movie industries are increasingly concerned about getting Google to play the role of “Internet police.”
TorrentFreak reports that Google has processed for the very first time, over 1 million requests per day, adding up to 7.8 million in a week, which is more than ten percent over the previous record which was registered last week. Of course, it should be mentioned that there seems to be a new top number every week.
The number of DMCA notices received by Google has been climbing dramatically over the past few years. Google began making public this type of data a few years ago. At the time, however, Google was only getting a few dozen notices over an entire year, not the amounts it’s getting now.
More specifically, in 2008 Google received one request every six days. For perspective, today, Google gets asked to take down a link every 8 milliseconds.
There’s a big issue with this increase of demands, however, and it’s not the fact that copyright owners are asking for links to infringing content to be taken down because they are now more aware than ever of the piracy phenomenon.
The problem is that Google goes through all these millions of requests and rejects a good part of them because there is either no copyrighted material on those pages, the notice is sent by mistake or it’s simply a case of abuse.
Google has gotten really good over the years at tracking down errors, especially since the flagging process for the likes of MPAA and RIAA is automated, which means that there are plenty of mistakes to be found. Of course, there are still plenty of link that get taken down by mistake since Google’s method isn’t fool-proof, but the number is small compared to the amount of links that continue to show up in search results even though various entities want them down while holding no rights over the content within.
Even the RIAA is starting to see that simply drowning Google in DMCA notices isn’t working. In fact, Brad Buckles, its executive vice president for the anti-piracy fight has said that they’re “using a bucket to deal with an ocean of illegal download” and a while back suggested that Google should just ban entire domains, completely disregarding the fact that even torrent sites hold legal content.