Surge in Google takedown requests

The number of takedown requests sent to Google asking for the removal of infringing content has shot up by 711,887 percent in four years, a report claims.

The report, An Empirical Analysis of DMCA Takedown Notices, which was published by the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, tracked the increase in Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests sent between 2007 and 2012.

It said the number of takedown requests handled by the search engine jumped from 62 in 2008 to more than 440,000 in 2012.

The year 2011/12 saw the biggest shift, with notices leaping from 67,571 to 441,370.

Micro-blogging site Twitter has also received a major increase in notices, which jumped from zero in 2008 to more than 6,000 in 2012.

A noticeable change that the report’s author Daniel Seng highlighted was that there was an increasing trend of rights owners citing multiple copyrighted works under one DMCA notice.

“We have changed from sending notices with one or two takedown requests to sending thousands of notices with millions of requests to service providers,” Seng wrote in the report, which was published on March 20.

Seng added: “It is disturbing to see the trend where more claims and more takedown requests are packed into each takedown notice. Up until 2010, each notice contained only one claim. But in 2011, the average number of claims per notice was 2.18, and in 2012, this average was 5.05.”

The most active copyright holders up until 2012 were the Recording Industry Association of America, Froytal and Microsoft, which each filed more than five million notices.

Seng added: “We have changed from a manual system with individual review of notices to an automated system where both reporters and service providers use computers to process huge numbers of notices and requests with very short turnaround times.

“With change comes the unavoidable consequences …. ill-informed copyright owners and reporters submitting vague, ambiguous and abusive takedown requests, lack of transparency about arrangements for automated submission and processing of ‘mega’ notices.”

The report said 59 percent of notices came from the music industry, followed by adult entertainment companies, which sent 20 percent, and the movie industry at 10 percent.

Google publishes takedown requests it receives as part of its transparency report, which is published every six months.