TorrentFreak took the liberty of processing all of Google’s weekly transparency reports from last year to find that the company fielded more link takedown requests from copyright holders in 2014 than ever before.
In total Google was asked to remove over 345 million links that were allegedly pointing to pirated content, representing a 75% increase in requests compared to the previous year.
To put in perspective the extent to which copyright holders are looking to Google to fight piracy on the web — consider that Google received 62 takedown requests throughout all of 2008, and it now receives over a million requests each day.
Google honors the majority of those million+ requests, which results in the link being removed from Google’s SERPS. Occasionally the search giant will take “no action” if the link is found to not be infringing on copyrights.
The most frequently targeted domains for link takedown requests include 4shared.com, rapidgator.net, and uploaded.net. Each of these domains can lay claim to 5 million of the link takedown requests processed last year.
There is reportedly tension growing between Google and copyright holders due to the belief that the search giant should be doing more to tackle the growing piracy problem.
To Google’s credit it recently made a significant change to fight piracy when it introduced the pirate update, which is designed to down rank sites that frequently link to material that infringes on copyrights.
Google has also argued that copyright holders need to do their part to reduce piracy:
“As services ranging from Netflix to Spotify to iTunes have demonstrated, the best way to combat piracy is with better and more convenient legitimate services. The right combination of price, convenience, and inventory will do far more to reduce piracy than enforcement can.”
Tensions between Google and copyright holders came to a head last month when Google ended its anti-piracy cooperation after the MPAA issued a ’snarky’ press release directed at Google.
