The giant Google has received requests to delete some 4 million unique domains, among which we find URLs from the Vatican, the FBI or even the White House.
As usual, with the removal in recent years of several billion URLs considered to be infringing from its search results, Google must manage the multiple requests for copyright infringement on a daily basis. In its report for the transparency of information, the Mountain View firm mentions requests relating all the same to 4 million unique domains.
4shared and RapidGator, among the most reported domains to Google
Google has therefore received DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices for more than 4 million unique domain names. These requests were sent under this text which is an American law allowing, within the framework of intellectual property, to fight against infringements of copyright in the digital age.
And it will come as no surprise to see that the most reported domain for copyright infringement is none other than 4shared, a file downloading and sharing service. Google removed nearly 69 million of its URLs years ago. But more recently, the site has begun working with the 5,578 copyright owners who have filed complaints to stop piracy by deploying filtering tools and technology.
The second domain with the most number of URL deletions (51 million) has been inactive for several years now. The website mp3toys hosted, as its name suggests, pirated MP3 files. RapidGator, better known in France, has seen more than 42 million of its URLs removed. The file-sharing site has already had more than 12,077 copyright holders on its back.
Sites that are legitimate are also the subject of requests for URL deletion
Interestingly, a tiny minority of 0.01% of domains (only 400) listed by Google are responsible for more than 41% of URLs removed by the company in recent years. ThePirateBay is one of the examples explaining this phenomenon, having generated a large amount of deleted URLs thanks to nearly 900 domain names. The expression “piratebay” has indeed known many variations and variants.
More surprisingly, and we said it at the very beginning of the article, there are legitimate sites reported to Google for copyright violations. The famous IMDb cinema database, for example, was reported 5,564 times, by 797 different organizations. Warner (134 URLs) and National Geographic (304) are among the copyright owners who have requested IMDb URL removals from Google.
The most surprising thing is to find in the list of legitimate sites having reported URLs belonging to the FBI (22), the White House (17) and the… Vatican, with 4 URLs reported. Google itself has had 700,000 URL removal requests. All the sites reported, the proof is, are not plagiarists or forgers. The really pirated contents finally concentrate only on a few hundreds of sites.
Source : TorrentFreak, Google Transparency Report
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