Google, arguably the biggest online entity, has been a major facet in assisting people with finding whatever they need or want. From links, photos, videos, and more, it only makes sense that at some point some of the content that ends up on Google may not be appear there legally. To keep Google from going down with this illegal content, Google has faced over a billion percent increase in takedown notices since 2006.
But how could this happen? How can that much content be removed from Google over the last ten years? Well if you traverse the Internet frequently enough, you might find links or content that’s flagged with a message from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or the DMCA). These takedown notices are a means to keep websites that thrive on user-generated content from having the U.S. government knock on their door and ruin their lives. The law was originally designed to help companies retain what is rightfully theirs online from piracy and making money off their IPs (intellectual properties).
Over the course of the last decade, however, this has had the fatal flaw of holding content caught in its crossfire guilty until proven innocent. Because of this, major companies have made a nasty habit of spamming DMCA notices like it’s Christmas. According to a recent transparency report, Google is currently juggling 75 million requests every month for search-related content alone. Just five years ago, Google was dealing with thousands of monthly DMCA notices and in the early 2000s the site only had up to eight a month, a note TorrentFreak made a brilliant point of.
Since [Bill] Clinton signed the bill into law in 1998, the argument can be made that the law is working perfectly as it was intended to do so. However, we cannot deny that plenty of innocent and legal content has gone down over the outlandish attacks major copyright holders have fired without the remorse or thought.We’ve already seen it happen from tracks and accounts completely falling with artists and online content creators struggling to keep their accounts afloat. What’s worse is thinking about how many more channels, pages, and websites on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud and more will have a hard time of arguing their online strikes when they’ve already lost in the eyes of the site they upload content to.
Source: TorrentFreak
