Google Faces a Flood of Copyright Removal Requests

As companies around the world remain firm in their fight against online piracy, Google receives more copyright-related removal requests than ever before. According to data published in Google’s Transparency Report, copyright owners filed requests to have more than 76 million URLs removed from search results due to copyright infringement in the past month. In the past week alone, the number of requests amounted to 21 million – the highest it has been since Google started reporting these numbers in 2011.

The industries fighting piracy, e.g. the music and movie industry but also software producers, are facing an almost Sisyphean task trying to protect their intellectual property online: for every file-sharing site that is shut down, another one pops up somewhere else. Cutting traffic to these sites by removing them from search results may the industry's best chance of limiting their damages by making pirated content harder to find.