There is plenty of copyrighted material available on the internet, some legal and some illegal. With websites so easy to startup, it certainly sounds like copyright holders have a hard time trying to catch every single one of them, but it certainly has not stopped them from trying. According to a report from TorrentFreak, it seems that we’re barely four months into the year and Google has been pretty busy with takedown requests.
To be exact, it seems that Google has been asked to remove around 100 million copyrighted links from their search results so far. In fact this is actually an increase from last year and a few years ago. To put this into perspective, in 2011 Google received about a few hundred takedown requests a day, but fast forward to 2015, that number has jumped significantly to more than a million links per day.
Last year Google took a month longer to hit that 100 million mark, indicating that there certainly is a renewed effort from copyright holders to remove infringing content. Like we said, websites are easy to startup and removing one link from Google could have another 5-10 take its place, making it seem like it is a neverending battle between the pirates and copyright holders.
That being said, this fervor has its collateral damage. For example there have been website owners and filehosting websites that have had their links removed from Google despite not hosting any copyrighted content, indicating that due to the increased number of requests, there are bound to be some mistakes made along the way.