Google Asked To Remove 10 Billion 'Pirate' Search Results (torrentfreak.com) 23
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion 'copyright infringing' URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn't celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests. [...] The path to 10 billion was turbulent. When Google first made DMCA details public it was processing a few million DMCA takedown requests in a year. That number swiftly increased to hundreds of millions and eventually reached a billion DMCA requests in 2016.
The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017, the takedown volume started to decline. The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results. By downranking pirate sites, infringing content became harder to find. As a result, Google processed fewer takedown notices, a welcome change for both rightsholders and the search engine. Today, Google continues to make pirate sites less visible in search, but the reduction in takedown notices didn't last. On the contrary, over the past several months, Google search processed a record number of DMCA notices.
Last summer, the search giant recorded the 7 billionth takedown request and after that the numbers shot up, adding billions more in the year that followed. The company is now handling removal requests at a rate of roughly 2.5 billion per year; a new record. This represents more than 50 million takedown requests per week and roughly 5,000 every minute. [...] While the 10 billionth reported URL is undoubtedly a milestone, this number is largely driven by a few rightsholders, reporting outfits, and domain names. The aforementioned takedown outfit Link-Busters, for example, accounts for roughly 15% of all reported links, nearly 1.5 billion. Similarly, the ten most prolific rightsholders, including the BPI, HarperCollins, and VIZ Media, are responsible for 40% of all reported links. These ten companies are only a tiny fraction of the 600,000 rightsholders that reported pirated links, however. A small group of domains also receives a disproportionate amount of attention. In total, 5,400,061 domains have been reported, with the top domains having dozens of millions of flagged URLs each. However, most domains have only a few flagged links, some of which are erroneous.
The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017, the takedown volume started to decline. The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results. By downranking pirate sites, infringing content became harder to find. As a result, Google processed fewer takedown notices, a welcome change for both rightsholders and the search engine. Today, Google continues to make pirate sites less visible in search, but the reduction in takedown notices didn't last. On the contrary, over the past several months, Google search processed a record number of DMCA notices.
Last summer, the search giant recorded the 7 billionth takedown request and after that the numbers shot up, adding billions more in the year that followed. The company is now handling removal requests at a rate of roughly 2.5 billion per year; a new record. This represents more than 50 million takedown requests per week and roughly 5,000 every minute. [...] While the 10 billionth reported URL is undoubtedly a milestone, this number is largely driven by a few rightsholders, reporting outfits, and domain names. The aforementioned takedown outfit Link-Busters, for example, accounts for roughly 15% of all reported links, nearly 1.5 billion. Similarly, the ten most prolific rightsholders, including the BPI, HarperCollins, and VIZ Media, are responsible for 40% of all reported links. These ten companies are only a tiny fraction of the 600,000 rightsholders that reported pirated links, however. A small group of domains also receives a disproportionate amount of attention. In total, 5,400,061 domains have been reported, with the top domains having dozens of millions of flagged URLs each. However, most domains have only a few flagged links, some of which are erroneous.
Oh, not *that* VIZ (Score:5, Funny)
> Similarly, the ten most prolific rightsholders, including the BPI, HarperCollins, and VIZ Media, are responsible for 40% of all reported links
Sad and disappointed to learn that VIZ Media has no relation to VIZ Magazine; home of Johnny Fartpants and the Fat Slags. Would have laughed my arse off if VIZ was among of the top pirated content worldwide. Anyway, stay classy Internet!
Re: Oh, not *that* VIZ (Score:2)
Viz Media? You mean that anime distributor that has been blacklisted in Canada?
Re: (Score:3)
It's actually kind of interesting and paradoxical. There is a big culture of unofficial fan-translations for Japanese fiction because really 99% of this stuff is not translated in any way and this is sort of allowed to exist by the original Japanese publishers to the point that fairly big websites that host these have ties with the Japanese publishing industry. These use these to gather what gains interest outside of Japan and then decide to give them an official translation, at which point the fan-translat
Re: (Score:2)
If the EVIL google actually wanted to fix the problem, then they would SOLVE it in the obvious way. They would white list the legitimate results as soon as they got reports of piracy. Any search that led to pirate results would, after the piracy was first reported, become a permanent link to the legitimate source. If someone wants to "publish" some other document or video that should be an acceptable result for that search, then they would have to apply to be added to the white list (and explain why, of cou
Re: (Score:2)
Only attempted joke on the topic? And you don't seem to have been going for Funny.
10 billion? (Score:2)
It's absurd to expect anyone to review that many takedown requests. It's absurd that anyone would claim to have found that many links to actual infringing content.
This demand stinks of algorithmic nonsense.
Re: (Score:2)
It happened recently. I suspect "AI" generated takedown requests.
Yandex FTW (Score:2)
Yandex.com is your search engine of choice for free TV content.
Actually, why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google search results have gone way downhill, and are full of garbage. There are a lot of links that need removed. But still: why should Google specifically remove links to pirated content?
I mean: it's content on the web. Google indexes content. It isn't really supposed to play censor - indeed, given Google's dominance, it is arguably illegal for it to censor legitimate web content.
Re: (Score:1)
Did you read TFA? These requests, to remove the listings, have been made under the DMCA. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. like an actual law. So, guess what it's definitely not "arguably illegal for it to censor legitimate web content".
Re:Actually, why? (Score:4, Informative)
Sigh (Score:3)
2.5bn a year is one every 12 milliseconds.
There is absolutely no way on Earth that proper human oversight is happening on those initial requests, let alone on Google's end being able to verify them.
The movie etc. industries now basically have a censorship tool that they can use as they see fit by just brute-force spamming DMCA requests because no human workforce could have created those lists in the first place, let alone deal with them all.
Congrats. We're now in a situation where automated bots fight automated bots for which content you're allowed to see.
And as far as I can tell, it's had zero practical effect on the ability of those determined enough to pirate things.
Flying Spaghetti Monster (Score:1)
TS (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
Tom Lehrer made all of his work free to download.
Re: (Score:2)
OK, but if you listen to much of it you get depressed.
Re: (Score:2)
Beware the person who reads one book, listens to one kind of music, votes based on one issue, and uses one operating system.
Ah google (Score:2)
They are vigilant about protecting IP profits but if you get bombarded with scammy ads, deceptive links and misinformation they don't give a crap.