Yes, you heard it right, they have asked the search giant to remove more than 1,000,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine in recent years. The remarkable milestone, reached this week, is at the center of an ongoing debate over how search engines are expected to deal with pirate sites. As I have noted above, this year has been a terrible year for the torrent websites. Consider this, in 2008, Google received only a few dozen takedown notices during the entire year. But in 2015, it receives and processes two million per day on average. Google’s Transparency Report published this week reveals that it has has been asked to remove over 1,007,766,482 links to allegedly having pirated content. Indeed, that’s more than a billion reported URLs, a milestone Google crossed just a few days ago. The number of notices continues to increase at a rapid pace as nearly half of the requests, 420 million, were submitted during the first months of 2015. The graph below illustrates this sharp rise in takedown notices.
In a submission to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator last week Google stated that it has taken various measures to help copyright holders, including swift removals. “We process more takedown notices, and faster, than any other search engine,” the search giant commented. We receive notices for a tiny fraction of everything we host and index, which nonetheless amounts to millions of copyright removal requests per week that are processed, on average, in under six hours.”
