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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.
"...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.
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.