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Links Piracy The Internet Google

Google Search Asked To Remove One Billion 'Pirate' Links In 9 Months (torrentfreak.com) 22

In a period of less than nine months, Google received requests to remove over a billion links to pirate sites from its search engine. This is a significant increase compared to recent years, but not necessarily a new trend. More than a quarter of all reported links, relating to a single website, were sent by MindGeek, the parent company of PornHub. TorrentFreak reports: Google first started to keep track of these takedown notices at the beginning of the last decade. In the spring of 2012, Google launched its Transparency Report which publishes all DMCA requests the company receives, including the targeted links and their senders. This provided fuel for hundreds of news reports as well as academic research. A few days ago, Google reached a new milestone when it processed the seven billionth removal request. It's a mind-boggling number that comes less than a year after the six billionth takedown was recorded.

Looking more closely at the timeline, we see that a billion URLs were reported to Google search in less than nine months. For comparison, it took twice as long to go from five to six billion, suggesting that the takedown volume picked up again after a previously reported decline. There's no denying the recent surge in reported links but much of the increase was generated by a single rightsholder in an effort to remove a particular pirate operation from Google search.

Around the start of the year MG Premium began to increase its takedown efforts. The company is an intellectual property vehicle of the MindGeek conglomerate, known for popular adult sites such as PornHub. One of MG Premium's main goals is to shut down âunlicensed' sites or at least make when unfindable. [...] The surge is clearly visible in the graph above and at times the company was averaging more than two million takedown requests per day. More recently the volume has come down a bit, but it's been a major contributor to Google's takedown uptick.

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Google Search Asked To Remove One Billion 'Pirate' Links In 9 Months

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  • by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @06:29AM (#63749858) Homepage
    Aharrrrgh! If only it were eight months.
  • Hey son, ya winning?

    Nope!
  • by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @09:26AM (#63750296)
    They attempted to shutdown the .com porn indexers such as daftsex.com, but they just moved to other addresses outside of DCMA's reach like .to addresses. So now MindGeek is crawling the porn indexers to generate take-downs.

    However, I don't think they understand how Google works. The shear number of requests seems to indicate that the URLs are being made to be unique. A URL that is only ever seen once is not likely to show up in a search result, so what they are asking Google to remove probably never would have shown up in a search result in the first place. And the people using the porn index still get useful links.

    Are they bothering to test to see if Google even returns a result before asking Google to block it? Does Google just not care and throw all this nonsense into a giant Bloom filter?
  • This is just one of the areas that the DMCA fails, MindGeek should pony up for its takedown requests.

    • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      Going after google is a good thing in my option. Google has the money humor these issues without having to really do anything. It keeps them away from the real content any way. When is the last time you used google to find a torrent? It's been useless for that for years.

  • Great, this will take a lot of the heat off of good old hard working honest pirates.

"The vast majority of successful major crimes against property are perpetrated by individuals abusing positions of trust." -- Lawrence Dalzell

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