Rights holders sent Google 345m DMCA takedown requests in 2014

As the debate around the effectiveness of the DMCA rages on in the United States, TorrentFreak calculated that 345 million takedown requests were sent to Google by rights holders over 2014. 

The number has increased exponentially since 2008 as there are now a number of companies that are employed by record labels and movie studios to scan the internet and automatically send takedown requests their behalf. 

Out of these 345 million requests, 60 million were issued by the UK’s British Phonographic Industry which represents the country’s recorded music sector. 

The domains subject to most requests, with over five million each, were 4shared.com, rapidgator.net and uploaded.net. 

Although Google has started to de-rank sites that are known to host pirated content, rights holders feel that there is na excessive burden placed upon them to “police” the internet and that they should only need to send a takedown request on a particular copyrighted work once. 

For example in the case of a site like Rapidgator, a record label will have to issue a different takedown request for every single upload of the same track, rather than sending one takedown request that would block any attempt to upload the track on the site again. 

It is hard to say whether and when we are going to see changes to the DMCA. Until we do though, the number of requests sent to Google every year is bound to continue to increase. 

 

(Andrea Leonelli)