Requests for Google to take down ‘pirate’ links soared to 345M in 2014

Google received a staggering 345 million requests in 2014 to remove links to content that violated copyright laws, an increase of 75 percent over the previous year, according to a report by TorrentFreak.

While Google doesn’t tally the annual requests, the tech blog crunched the numbers on the weekly reports that Google posts on takedown requests. That data shows that copyright holders continued to get more aggressive last year in their battle to control the digital distribution of their content.

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“These requests have increased dramatically over the years,” according to TorrentFreak. “In 2008, the search engine received only a few dozen takedown notices during the entire year, but today it processes more than a million reported ‘pirate’ links per day.”

The exact total for 2014 was 345,169,134. Of that total, UK music industry group BPI submitted the most takedown requests, with 60 million links. Google honors most of the requests, according to TorrentFreak.

Copyright groups have long argued that Google should do more to police its search results and remove links to pirated content. Google, in response, argues that the best way to reduce piracy is to make more digital content available legally at reasonable costs to fill the demand.