Google Receives Takedown Request Every 8 Milliseconds

Via TorrentFreak comes news that Google is now being asked to remove one million links per day (or an average of one takedown notice every 8ms). In 2008, they received one takedown request approximately every six days. From the article: The massive surge in removal requests is not without controversy. It’s been reported that some notices reference pages that contain no copyrighted material, due to mistakes or abuse, but are deleted nonetheless. Google has a pretty good track record of catching these errors, but since manual review of all links is unachievable, some URLs are removed in error. ... The issue has also piqued the interest of U.S. lawmakers. Earlier this year the House Judiciary Subcommittee had a hearing on the DMCA takedown issue, and both copyright holders, Internet service providers, and other parties are examining what they can do to optimize the process. In the meantime, the number of removal requests is expected to rise and rise, with 10 million links per week being the next milestone.

or they could just NOT do it

[cellocgw]

Instead of having software automatically remove every alleged infracting page, how about having the software automatically send a notice back informing the complainant of a lack of credible evidence, and dropping all the takedown notices into some summer intern's Inbox?

I mean, jeez...

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

"...parties are examining what they can do to optimize the process."

Well, you could start by requiring that the entire notice be filed under penalty of perjury, not just the part that says you are who you claim to be.
You could also start by requiring that the notice provide *evidence* (sufficient to sustain a claim of copyright infringement in a court of law) of the claimed infringement.

Failure to do *either* or *both* of these is just going to result in the request rate increasing to the point where it is impossible for even a fully-automated system to handle them on the receiving end, because there's currently no downside to sending a bogus DMCA takedown notice.

First hand experience

[Charliemopps]

I used to work in a department that handled DMCA notices on the consumer side. (They were complaining that our customers were hosting the content) The vast majority of these complaints were fraudulent. The problem is that the media companies hire other companies to monitor for infringement and send take-down notices. I suspect they pay per notice sent and they are getting swindled. Some were so bad, we literally blacklisted their domain so they'd stop sending us complaints. They'd send take down notices for people that weren't even in our IP block. They were just sending nonsense and collecting money from the content provider. This likely also where the content providers get their insane numbers about the amount of money they are losing.

Re:Faulty logic

[BronsCon]

GoDaddy filed a DMCA request against one of my sites a few years back. The site was comprised of entirely original, all-text content (e.g. no images they could claim ownership of, and text entirely from my own fingers), but they didn't like the subject matter (a complaint regarding how they handle user-initiated termination of their domain privacy services), so, rather than contact me to resolve the issue (I had been unable to contact anyone on their end who could do anything for me) they fired off a DMCA takedown request to my VPS provider.

My VPS provider, being a reasonable company, saw that I was hosting several sites and, rather than take down the instance, forwarded the request to me. I contacted them to inform them that I intended to dispute the request and that no content would be removed as a result, they write back indicating that they figured that's what I would do and fully understood as they agreed the request was bogus. I CC'd GoDaddy's support team on that email, as well.

GoDaddy's next move was to file a WHOIS data inaccuracy complaint with ICANN. My next move was to CC their support team on my response to that.

In the end, I got a call from their VP of corporate development, or some such, who was able to immediately resolve my issue and light a fire under the dev team's ass to fix the issue permanently, and I took the site down. Had they worked with me from the start, the site never would have existed in the first place, but that's apparently not how GoDaddy (and, as is clear if you follow the news, other large corporations) wants to run things; they'd rather throw money out the window playing games and bullying people, instead of working with them to solve actual problems people have with their services.

In the end, the 20+ domains I had registered through them ended up on a different registrar and they got some bad PR and a perpetual negative review from me when people ask me (and they often do) who they should register their domains through or host their website with.