Google has had its hands full (so to speak) this year removing links to pages that infringe on copyrights. In the past year, the search engine giant removed links to more than 51 million pages, which is a significant increase from the last few years.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) processes about half a million links every day for infringing on other sites, and that number is rising every week. Google publishes its Transparency Report to inform the public of all the takedown requests it receives. Just last week the site received more than 3.5 million takedown requests—15 times as many as the site received in January.
Degban, a copyright protection agency, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are the top two senders with the most requests for Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) this month. The copyright owners that have seen the most violations in the past month include members of the RIAA, Fox and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT). So far this year FilesTube seems to be one of the greatest copyright infringers with more than 2 million links that were requested to be taken down for infringement.
Hollywood and a number of major record labels want Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) to crack down on internet piracy even harder. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said recently, “There is a staggering amount of copyright infringement taking place every day online, and much of it is facilitated by Google, as their own data shows.”
The copyright industry as a whole has been trying to get Google to delist The Pirate Bay, which is one of the most popular BitTorrent sites. The Pirate Bay has been flagged repeatedly for offering up files for sharing that are protected by a copyright, like movies, music, etc.
Although Google has not yet delisted any sites, it did start to downgrade sites that are known for piracy violations. At this point it’s too early to tell if this is cutting down on the amount of piracy that goes on over the Internet.
