14 DAY TRIAL // Google always gets swamped with millions upon millions of DMCA notices as if taking out content from the search engine will make it completely disappear from the social network.
Copyright holders from all corners of the world send Google millions of DMCA notices each week asking the search engine to take down countless links to various allegedly illegal content.
There’s no better proof to how useless some of these demands are than the number of DMCA notices Google completely ignores.
The company’s data indicates that in 2013 some 21 million takedown requests were discarded either because the claims were invalid, or because duplicates had been sent previously. The issue with all these useless requests is that someone at Google wastes his or her time going over them.
TorrentFreak points out that this year, the situation is getting even worse and that duplicating demands seems to be getting out of hand. Studios on each side of the Atlantic are getting higher percentage rates of URLs that were not removed from the search results.
While there are obvious differences between the number of demands each organization sends and the successful percentage rates, a trend seems to be showing up – no one knows what links they’ve asked to be removed.
It can’t possibly be the case of a company hoping for Google to agree to taking down a certain URL after refusing to do so on a previous occasion. Most likely, the services that automatically put together the lists aren’t even calibrated to compare between lists sent a while back and the new ones.
The site points out to an interesting situation where NBC asks Google to take down a series of links available on the search results pages leading to isoHunt.com. The problem with them is that the site was shut down last year and the links that show up in the DMCA notices simply don’t exist.
On other occasions, Hotfile is the targeted site, another one that was actually shut down thanks to an action from Hollywood studios. Megaupload is yet another dead site that’s often being targeted by copyright holders, but the list is quite extensive.
The issue isn’t just that Google’s time is wasted with pointless demands, but also that copyright holders, especially in Hollywood, don’t really seem to care whether the links they ask to be removed are active, come from a proper site, are homepages or freeware software that can be downloaded from anywhere without restrictions.