Google Killed 51.4M Links to Copyrighted Material in 2012

In 2012, the number of removed websites was a staggering 51,395,353, according to TorrentFreak. The number increased almost 10-fold year over year. TorrentFreak says that Google currently processes more than 500,000 pirate links every day.

The number of removal requests is exploding as well: The search engine stated that it received more than 13 million URLs located at almost 43,000 different domains in December alone. Google was contacted by more than 1,200 different organizations and more than 2,000 copyright owners. The most active copyright owners were the RIAA as representative of the U.S. music industry; the BPI as representative of the British music industry; Froytal Services as representative of the adult film industry, Fox, and Microsoft.

The top offending domains were filestube.com, bittorrent.com, sumotorrent.com, filetram.com, and torrentz.eu.

The sheer number of takedown requests shows how much effort organizations put into submitting copyright violations to Google. Degban, a company that can be contracted to find pirated material and follow through with removal requests, has submitted the most removal requests to Google - 12.0 million over the past 17 months. Google said that Degban submits an average of 632 removal requests containing an average of 45,143 URLs per week.

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