Google fighting more than 1m pirate links per day

21 Aug 2014

Internet search giant Google and copyright holders are facing an ever-increasing battle over illegal downloading and are now removing 1m torrent links every day.

The search engine has been kept busy by intellectual property owners of the vast amounts of music, TV, films and books that appear online. According to Torrent Freak, this marks the first time removal requests have reached a seven-digit figure.

As part of its transparency, Google lists on a daily basis the links and companies that ask for the removal of URL links, which have increased tenfold since Google has begun making the process public.

According to Google’s figures, the most frequent requester for links to be taken down is multimedia protection company called Degban. Since the record began, Degban has requested that 93,793,407 individual URLs be removed for 106 different companies it represents, particularly two companies, RK Netmedia and Froyal Services, the latter of which provides mysteriously no search results in the Google search engine.

Last week alone, Google received 7.8m requests for link termination, which, when the maths is run, equates to one removal claim every eight milliseconds compared with six per day back in 2008, when Google began documenting them.

With such a barrage of requests every day, Google is struggling to process them in a timely fashion, but critics still believe many of these requests do not contain much merit or authenticity.

With regard to Degban, the largest number of domains they specify as hosting illegal URLs is the torrent site torrenthound.com, which has so far had 1,257,294 URL takedown requests.

Pirate Bay image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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