Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion 'copyright infringing' URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn't celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests.
While search engines are extremely helpful for the average Internet user, copyright holders have also seen a massive downside.
In addition to trillions of legitimate pages, there’s a steady supply of pirate sites. These can be hard to ignore for some entertainment-hungry users.
This problem is not new. When piracy-discovery became web-based with the surge of BitTorrent in the early 2000s, search engines were unwittingly used as pirate gateways. Luckily for rightsholders, however, U.S. law provided a solution; DMCA notices.
In the hope of steering prospective pirates away from pirate sites, copyright holders began sending DMCA takedown requests to Google. These notices flag pirate links, which Google then removes from its search index.