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Google Asked to Remove a Billion 'Pirate' Search Results in a Year (torrentfreak.com)
Copyright holders asked Google to remove more than 1,000,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine over the past twelve months, TorrentFreak reports. According to stats provided in Google's Transparency Report for the past one year, Google was asked to remove over one billion links -- or 1,007,741,143 links. From the article: More than 90 percent of the links, 908,237,861 were in fact removed. The rest of the reported links were rejected because they were invalid, not infringing, or duplicates of earlier requests. In total, Google has now processed just over two billion allegedly infringing URLs from 945,000 different domains. That the second billion took only a year, compared to several years for the first, shows how rapidly the volume of takedown requests is expanding. At the current rate, another billion will be added by the end of next summer. Most requests, over 50 million, were sent in for the website 4shared.com. However, according to the site's operators many of the reported URLs point to the same files, inflating the actual volume of infringing content.
The blurb quoted above missing the important part at the end of the article.
The Copyright Office launched a public consultation in order to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the current DMCA provisions. This review is still ongoing and was extended earlier this month.
I feel like I keep up to date with things but this caught me by surprise. Not only haven't I heard about this, but this is a pretty damn big deal. Safe harbor and other provisions, such as the notice and takedown, all rely on this law. As flawed as it is, it has helped protect the Internet as we know it. Without those provisions, we'd never see the rise of YT or music services.
As distracting as this past election has been, this shouldn't be allowed to be slipped by us. Get on this with your letters and calls.