The battle against piracy continued throughout 2016 with copyright holders fiercely protecting their property, sometimes with rather ironic consequences. For instance, Fox issued a DMCA takedown request against an original YouTube clip showing a Double Dribble exploit that had been edited into an episode of Family Guy.
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However, according to its Transparency Report, Google received just under 1.1 billion takedown requests during the course of last year, of which over 914 million requests were approved. This represents a near 100% increase over the 558 million requests received in 2015. Notably, the search company reached a peak of 24.1 million requests for the week ending September 19th, 2016, up from the prior weekly record set of 22.7 million in April that same year.
In terms of copyright holders, BPI, which represents the UK recorded music industry, submitted a staggering 82.4 million removal requests in 2016 while its US counterpart, the RIAA, sent a total of 12.6 million takedown requests to Google.
Looking more holistically at annual trends, Google has received the following number of takedown requests:
- 2011: 10,000,000 (approximate)
- 2012: 50,000,000 (approximate)
- 2013: 235,000,000 (approximate)
- 2014: 345,169,134
- 2015: 555,860,089
- 2016: 1,074,273,984
While monthly request volumes began to taper off toward the end of 2016, it remains to be seen if subscription services such as Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video provide timely access to enough content to dissuade consumers from turning to illegal sources.
Source: TorrentFreak via UberGizmo
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