14 DAY TRIAL // Copyright holders will go after just about anyone they think is infringing on their content, even if that someone is a site with barely any traffic at all, such as mp3toys.xyz.
This site, mp3toyz.xyz, has barely any traffic at all, TorrentFreak reports, but it has become the second most complained about site on the entire Internet. In fact, in the past six months, Google received over 50.6 million notices regarding it.
Google's Transparency Report reveals lots of information about the sites that are being targeted by takedown notices sent by copyright holders. As you may know, the report features a full record of all DMCA notices received by Google, asking the search engine to remove links leading to various sites containing infringing content.
The top site that was targeted in recent months was 4shared.com, with 5,270 copyright owners demanding their rights, coming from 1,246 organizations. The number of URLs targeted was over 50.7 million.
Second on the list was mp3toys.xyz, and despite having just 650 copyright owners making demands, as part of 37 organizations, over 49.4 million URLs were targeted. That's a massive number for a site pretty much no one has heard about.
MP3Toys is a pirate platform allowing users to download music from thousands of artists. This isn't the only one of its kind as pretty much all torrent sites provide unlicensed downloads for tracks and albums. The site has been appearing in Google's databases since mid-summer last year, which means it has received about 1.6 million URL takedown notices every week since.
According to Alexa, however, the site isn't all that popular, as you'd expect from a site that ranks second in Google's DMCA notices. In fact, the .xyz domain of MP3Toys ranks the 25 millionth most popular. The .tech domain ranks 266,844. In short, no one knows about this site aside from copyright holders, it seems.
So how did this happen?
This seems to be, once again, a case of copyright holders sending bogus takedown requests, as they've done countless times, with their systems not even working properly to figure out which content is infringing and which one isn't. In fact, they're pretty much doing guess work about what the URLs should look like, without even scanning the site for the actual content.
TorrentFreak reports that APDIF do Brasil, an antipiracy group, makes up the URLs, while MP3Toys randomly generates a page of music that has nothing to do with the URL input. APDIF logs it as infringing and bugs Google about removing it.
With 50.6 million takedown notices, Mp3Toys is on the way to becoming the most targeted site by copyright holders.