14 DAY TRIAL // The Recording Industry Association of America is adamant to put a stop to online piracy it seems, even if it doesn’t exactly aim in the right spot. So far, the RIAA has demanded for Google to remove 50 million URLs from its search engines.
The organization hasn’t just sent a record number of requests, but it has managed to double the numbers in less than a year, TorrentFreak reports.
The RIAA’s fight against music piracy has translated into over 14,907 separate DMCA takedown notices, most of which were directed at Google. Since it made the announcement, the organization has requested another 377,000 links to be removed from the search results pages.
Most of the demands submitted by the RIAA targeted search engine filestube.com, while pisamba.com, downloads.nl, mp3skull.com and beemp3.com make up the rest of the top five, according to Google’s own data.
Google is known for its quick response on such issues, often taking down links that it is asked to. Of course, the company rejects its fair share of takedown notices. Despite all the efforts put in by the search engine giant, the RIAA is never satisfied with how the entire process works. More specifically, it is annoyed that the links keep popping back up with a modified URL, something that can’t really be helped.
“All those links to infringing music files that were automatically repopulated by each pirate site after today’s takedown will be re-indexed and appear in search result tomorrow. Every day we have to send new notices to take down the very same links to illegal content we took down the day before. It’s like ‘Groundhog Day’ for takedowns,” said Cary Sherman, RIAA CEO.
Organizations like the RIAA are known for always asking search engines to do more to fight piracy and to remove link after link, all the while complaining about how the companies aren’t doing enough. Even so, they seem to forget that the entire process is useless since most pirates never bother with going to Google or Bing or Yahoo or any other search engine to search for a certain torrent file.
Instead, they go to the homepage of the site they like most and search things there. Despite what the RIAA seems to believe, taking down a link from Google’s search results pages doesn’t make the file disappear or the link to vanish; it just makes its slightly harder to find, but not impossible.
The RIAA doesn’t care, though, and wants Google to lift takedown limits, and to sanction pirate sites until they no longer appear in the search results. The Internet company, on the other hand, believes that it is already doing more than enough and has suggested that copyright holders should consider improving their SEO practices and to focus on what the consumers want – lower prices.