Google Received 1 Billion Piracy Link Reports In 9 Months

The Google search engine has long been a tool that is indispensable in our daily lives. This applies to all areas of the Internet, including piracy. A corresponding number of links are objected to by Google – currently more than ever before.

Piracy alert at Google

Google is now almost a quarter of a century old and there is hardly a networked person in the Western world who does not know the search engine and often uses it. For almost all aspects of our online life, the first route leads to Google, including illegal content, of course. Here, Google often performs a balancing act between what is forbidden and what is tolerated, but in recent years the search engine giant has increasingly made life difficult for pirates.

For rights owners, the path to complaining about links is relatively easy, as they must take action against infringements under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – or what they believe to be infringements. This is now rarely done manually, because the rights owners commission specialized providers to search for copyright infringements, and they, in turn, rely on bots and other automatisms.

This also explains why the number of takedowns is increasing. As TorrentFreak reports, Google has now announced the milestone of seven billion removed links. What is astonishing is not necessarily the total number per se, but when there was last such a report.

Because between six and seven billion takedowns have passed in less than nine months. Although one can certainly say that the number of reported links is increasing overall, in this specific case one can and must emphasize one rights owner, namely MG Premium. This is none other than MindGeek, the porn empire behind sites like Pornhub.

The background here is also that MindGeek was able to assert itself in court against an illegal “tube” provider called Daftsex last year. That didn’t prevent its operator from continuing, on alternative domains. This has resulted in MG Premium unleashing a tidal wave of takedowns.

In addition, it must also be emphasized that the seven billion reports cannot be equated one-to-one with actual violations, since there are, among other things, duplicates and also pages that are not listed on Google at all.