Google Handles a Billion Piracy Takedown Requests in a Year

As the biggest provider of search results on the Internet, Google receives a constant barrage of requests to remove content from its results. Some of those requests come from governments, but the majority are submitted by copyright owners very keen to stop their work from being pirated.

These requests arrive in the form of a URL takedown demand, which Google then needs to verify is a legitimate claim before taking the appropriate action. And all the data related to those requests is combined into the regularly updated Google Transparency Report.

The latest figures make for some surprising reading. TorrentFreak reports that over the last year, Google received over a billion URL takedown requests from copyright holders. Of those, just under 909 million turned out to be legitimate and got removed, with those infringing links leading to 347,000 affected websites.

The scale of the takedown system Google runs is huge, and it's growing at a phenomenal rate. Consider that Google kicked off the takedown request program in March 2011. In total 1.97 billion URLs have been removed since then. From 2011 to 2015 it generated around 970 million requests, but the other billion happened just in the last year. How much will it have grown again by November 2017?

Recommended by Our Editors

Getty Images: Google Promotes Piracy

Google allows you to explore the data, which reveals who the reporting organizations are, as well as which domains suffered the most with removed links. Takedown agencies Rivendell and Degban join publisher BPI at the top of the charts, each submitting in the region of 250 million takedown requests. As for domains, 4shared easily topped the charts with over 50 million URLs removed.