The number doubled in the past ten months

Sep 22, 2014 12:23 GMT  ·  By

The British Phonographic Industry has managed to outdo itself and it’s not necessarily a good thing. The group has sent Google enough takedown requests to cover 100 million URLs.

After you let that number sink in, you should also know that the music industry group continues to say that Google isn’t doing enough to fight against privacy, which is basically accusing Google of doing what a search engine is supposed to do – amass information and provide people relevant information for whatever it is they are looking for.

The biggest issue seems to be the fact that despite the growing number of legal alternatives for listening to music, the stream of music downloads from torrent sites remains constant. Of course, such services aren’t present in all countries of the globe and in many of them there isn’t a real competition between companies and, therefore, the prices are still way over what people are willing to pay each month.

BPI and many other copyright owners and defenders of artists have been sending millions of takedown notices to various Internet services, as well as search engines. Google has been the recipient of many of these, TorrentFreak points out.

50 million new links in 10 months

The 100 million URLs milestone comes after just 10 months since the number stood at 50 million. BPI has sent over 274,810 separate DMCA notices to cover all these links, which means there was an average of 363 URLs in each demand.

All in all, the BPI is the most active copyright holder representative. None before it has sent so many link takedown requests, although Degban is coming in close, with 99 million, which means it’s not going to be long before it hits the mark as well. The RIAA has sent notices for 57 million links, which puts it on the third spot.

“This milestone makes two things very clear. First, that however much creators do, the system of ‘notice and takedown’ will never be enough on its own to protect them or consumers from the online black market, or to spur growth in the digital economy,” said a BPI spokesperson.

He added that despite the clear knowledge about which sites are “engines of piracy” Google continues to help build their illegal businesses, by giving them a prominent ranking in search results.

The BPI once more says that Google should do more to lower the visibility of unauthorized content, an area where it believes there has been little improvement.

“To illustrate: Google’s records show it has been told more than 10 million times that content on 4shared.com is illegal – yet it’s still the very first result today when we search for ‘Calvin Harris mp3′ – ahead of Amazon and every other legal service,” BPI says.

The industry representative wants Google to change its algorithm, something that Google obviously doesn’t want to do because messing with this would not only stop some people from getting the exact type of content they want, but it could also mess it up in other areas.