Groups like the RIAA are putting in millions of DMCA requests to pull “pirate” links off Google, and even though it doesn’t seem to help, the landslide’s not letting up. As of last month, Google was taking down nine pirate links every single second of every single day.
Torrentfreak dug through the latest Google transparency report to discover that in the last week of September, Google removed 5.3 million links thanks to takedown notices from the DMCA. That’s nine per second (if you round up), roughly 540 per minute, and 32,400 per hour. That’s a lot of links.
The 5.3 million in a week is, for the time being, an all time high, but historically the macro trend has been an ever upward climb so it’s only safe to guess that it’ll be even higher soon. This graph sums it up pretty well:
According to Torrentfreak, the 5,310,080 takedowns came from 5,407 different rightsholders, and spanned 37,413 domains. The number one target? File hoster ZippyShare, with music linking sites Dilandau and BeeMP3 in second and third.
5.3 million requests in a week is a pretty tall order, but it looks like Google can and will handle them as fast as they get dished out. But that seems like an awful lot of work for little payoff if piracy really isn’t killing content anyway. Besides, who’s actually using Google for their piracy anyway?