In its latest copyright transparency report, Google has revealed it receives 113,688 copyright takedown requests an hour, formally known as Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices.
In one week alone, it received 19 million requests from rights holders, or those acting on behalf of them; most were associated with the music and film industries.
To put it into perspective, this 19-million requests figure is more than double what the company was dealing with at the same time last year, and overshadows the 4 million requests made during the same week in 2013.
What’s even more incredible is that fact that of these millions upon millions of requests being made, close to 97% are upheld and addressed within six hours of being flagged.
Taking a close look at the numbers, the top pirate sites that Google is directed to is mostly “free” music and video sharing sites. They are a resilient bunch, and often continue to operate, business-as-usual, even after the relevant URL is no longer available.
Copyright protection is a fairly young industry, but it’s seeing rapid growth, especially in recent years. That’s because it is incredibly easy to create a site, upload content, and create new pages within that website. The actual tracking down of these questionable pages layered within these new sites requires a level of skill and fortitude, and has led to the creation of a new job market for fraud specialists working on behalf of copyright holders to uphold the rules.
If there’s any sort of positive point to be made about this story, it’s that the high number of requests is probably a good reflection of an improvement in the technology being used to locate and identify pirate sites.
Read the full Google Transparency Report
Via TheNextWeb
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