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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  • dns7950
    As long as thepiratebay.se is still going strong, nobody cares
    Reply
  • Simu
    Internet never goes copyrighted, P2P is non-stopping.
    Reply
  • Pherule
    This news doesn't bode well. Duckduckgo or startpage, anyone?
    Reply
  • jerm1027
    DuckDuckGo = Win
    Reply
  • borisof007
    I use torrentz.eu myself, pretty funny.
    Reply
  • Gundam288
    I would LOVE to see the yearly comparison between Google and Bing and maybe Yahoo for Copyright take downs. It would be pretty neat to see how much each company gets in terms of take down request and follow thru.
    Reply
  • mobrocket
    Froytal as an interesting client list

    Reply
  • jonjonjon
    and it still accomplished nothing. waste of time! time to rethink your methods.
    Reply
  • ivanto
    Quadlook is my default browser in Chrome.
    Reply
  • NuclearShadow
    Excuse my ignorance on this matter as I am not a pirate. But isn't this fruitless? I just typed torrentz.eu into Google itself and it links to it. Since they don't actually block any mention of the alleged violating site I am guessing they take out very specific pages instead from the search. But if I decided I am going to be a pirate starting now couldn't I just go to torrentz.eu now and just use their search?

    What could they possibly achieve in the end if this doesn't curve piracy? Wouldn't it make more sense to leave those links up and then subpoena Google for their records which could very well include information about those who clicked the link? Possibly even down to names and addresses if they happened to be signed into Gmail or another Google service at the time.
    Reply