Copyright and piracy issues have become more of headline grabbers in last couple of years for the fact that copyright holders have been increasingly pushing out takedown requests to Google and other search engines.
According to latest stats provided by Google, the search engine giant received requests to take down more than 345 million links to pirated content for the year 2014 alone. This is up from just 62 back in 2008 – a 550,000,000 per cent increase in the span of 6 years.
Comparing the takedown requests it received in 2013, the numbers in 2014 are up by 75 per cent with more and more companies lean towards using search engines to fight piracy. Looking at the numbers in 2014, Google received almost a million takedown requests each day.
According to the details provided by Google, the most frequently targeted domains include 4shared.com, rapidgator.net, and uploaded.net – each domain being at the receiving end of five million takedown requests.
Google has given out an interesting reason as to why people resort to piracy. Google is of the opinion that some people turn to downloading and consuming illegal content because it is either difficult or too expensive to get hold of content legitimately.
“Piracy often arises when consumer demand goes unmet by legitimate supply”, Google states in its report.
Google gives example of services like Netflix, Spotify, and iTunes and how they have helped in reducing piracy by providing “The right combination of price, convenience, and inventory”.
