For three years now, copyright holders or their representatives have been able to contact Google with an online form in order to have links removed from the Google search.
In July 2014, Google received 30 million requests to delete links, which are allegedly infringing copyrights, from their search. From a statistical point of view, they got nearly 1 million requests every day – this is a record high for Google.
Moreover, Google’s Transparency Report displays that 47.301 domains were named by 4.547 different copyright holders. Websites with the most link removal requests are infamous online-sharing services such as listengo and 4shared.
In comparison to the previous year, the number of requests has increased by 40% and it’s an obvious indication that copyright holders are now increasing their fight against illegal file sharing.
It is not surprising that BPI – the largest music industry representative company in UK – alone has sent 6.3 million requests.
Moreover, there are even service contractors today specializing in finding and taking down links to copyrighted content as well as fining the website’s owners. Of course, such companies can be found in the top list of most removal requests: TakeDown Piracy LLC, MarkMonitor AntiPiracy and Degban.
My views considering filesharing and piracy have changed a lot by now.
If you really like an album, a game, a program or a movie – you should show your support and buy it. The ones who most suffer from piracy are the little indie game developers, the newcomer musicians and the media graduates. There’s more than enough legal and cheap or even free content providers out there these days, such as Spotify, Netflix, iTunes and Google Play.
Even though it seems that the copyright holders are going to extreme measures, I think these measures are absolutely correct. Blocked videos on YouTube unfortunately can’t be avoided.
Information Source and Chart: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/?hl=en_US
Image Source (Featured Image) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
