Google gets a million copyright takedowns a day

In the past week, Google has received an average of one million requests per day to remove content that allegedly infringes copyright. That’s the highest number of takedown requests ever.

While Google received an average of 19,000 removal requests per day three years ago, that number has now risen to more than a million. This is according to Google’s transparency report. This is the first time that Google has received so many takedown requests. This only concerns requests for removal from the search index of pages that would infringe copyright; deletion requests based on the right to be forgotten are not included.

That means Google is now getting a takedown request about every 85 milliseconds, writes Torrentfreak, who was the first to notice that the number of takedown requests per day had passed one million. In the past month, Google received a removal request for 30 million URLs, spread over 47,000 different domains.

In the same month, the British music industry’s trade association BPI was the most enthusiastic requester of takedown requests, with 6.3 million URLs seeking to have it removed from Google’s search index. Listengo.com, a site for finding MP3s, was the most frequent in removal requests.