Google asked to remove 345m torrent links in 2014

5 Jan 2015

In 2014, Google dealt with a ‘torrent’ of torrents, with recent figures showing that in the whole year, the internet search giant had been asked to remove more than 345m links to copyrighted content by their holders.

According to the figures obtained by Torrent Freak, this marks the highest number of DMCA requests received by Google to date accounting for an increase of 75pc on 2013.

Totalling exactly 345,169,134, the links related to the number of URL links found by the media content’s copyright holders and when put into perspective, totals approximately 6.6m requests every week.

In what has now become a well-known statistic, back in 2008 Google only received around a dozen requests during the entire year as companies continue their attempts to clamp down on illegal file sharing.

In the face of this exponential increase in requests, Google has attempted to restrict the flow of links from the source by automatically removing a number of links in search results entered by users depending on their use of infringing key words.

However, their attempts have shown little success bar giving the copyright holders making these requests an indication that that are at least trying to stem the tide.

Earlier research undertaken by Torrent Freak had shown that the domain to receive the most requests during 2014 had been 4shared.com who had received over 8.35m requests during the calendar year, followed by rapdigator.net which had approximately 7.84m requests for link removals.

Torrent downloading image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com