Last month, Google processed over 75 million search takedown requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), or over 100,000 links per hour. That’s more than double the number of links it processed during the same period last year, and over 300 times more requests than in 2012. So why the dramatic increase? Obviously, the amount of pirated content has increased exponentially on the internet, as Torrent Freak points out. At the same time, the MPAA, RIAA and other copyright-holders are now using algorithms that spot pirated content (often incorrectly) and automatically file takedown notices to Google.
Google has said that the system is working as intended, but nobody is particularly happy about it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)successfully sued Universal Studios to force copyright owners to consider legitimate “fair use” of content more carefully. At the same time, copyright holders feel that infringing pirate sites should have their domains de-listed from Google search altogether, something that Mountain View strongly opposes. At the rate it’s going so far, Google may process a billion DMCA search requests by the end of 2016 — a number that shows that the DMCA system is seriously broken.
