(25 December 2018) The three most active ‘copyright owners’ have asked Google to remove more than a billion allegedly infringing links from its search engine results. While more than 160,000 rightsholders have asked Google to remove content, 0.0001% are responsible for the majority of the flagged links.
Day in and day out copyright holders are flooding Google with DMCA takedown notices, pointing out links to pirated content.
While the volume has started to decrease over the past year or two, the numbers are still dazzling.
In 2018, copyright holders have reported around 700 million allegedly infringing links to the search engine. Most of these are processed swiftly, making the URLs unfindable in search results.
Since Google started counting in 2011, more than 160,000 copyright owners have used Google’s takedown tool. Together, they submitted more than 3.8 billion URLs. However, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that a small number of rightsholders are responsible for a lot of the action.
The UK music industry group BPI tops the list of most prolific ‘copyright owners’. It reported 425 million URLs over the years, which is more than 10% of all the reported pages.
TorrentFreak has the article in full.
