Last year, Google received more than 345 million requests to take down links that were allegedly copyright infringements. According to Torrent Freak, these numbers are a 75% increase from the previous year. The amount of take down requests that Google receives seems to increases dramatically each year. In 2008, only a mere few dozen requests were received.
The majority of the take down requests were received from sites like 4shared.com, rapidgator.net and uploaded.net. Each site had over five million reportedly infringing links. The UK music industry group BPI was the top copyright holder for 2014 with more than 60 million reported links.
Many Google users may have already noticed within the past year or two the steps that Google has made in order to decrease the amount of copyright infringing links. If you search for particular download links, many of the results will show up with a short explanation saying that the link had been removed for copyright infringement. Google uses an algorithm to process more than a million “pirate” links per day. However, that algorithm is still clearly not enough.
Google claims that this vast amount of piracy is a result of consumers having a lack of legal options available. “Piracy often arises when consumer demand goes unmet by legitimate supply,” says Google. “The right combination of price, convenience, and inventory will do far more to reduce piracy than enforcement can.”
