According to Google’s recent Transparency Report, the search engine giant receives over 65 million takedown requests per month by copyright holders who want their intellectual property removed from search results. The number of piracy-related takedown requests for this past October breaks down to 65,122,023 requests for the month, which is over 2 million per day and about 87 thousand requests per hour. As Torrent Freak points out, “This translates to 1,500 links per minute, or 25 per second, and is double the amount being handled last year around the same time.” 

Approximately five thousand different reporters make such requests to Google, a comparatively low number in light of the high volume of requests. Many of these reporters are law firms or anti-piracy services that represent multiple copyright holders. The top reporting organizations typically represent clients in the film, television and music industries, as well as software companies. Some of the copyright owners represented in the most frequent takedown requests include the British Recorded Music Industry, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), CBS, Lionsgate, Microsoft and Adobe. 

It’s important to note that the numbers above include multiple requests to remove the same URL. Google includes this statistic in the report as it “paints a more complete picture of the removals activity.” Additionally, these figures do not account for takedown requests for Google services such as Blogger and YouTube, strictly the search engine. As the internet negotiates the freedoms of unfettered information sharing with the rights of copyright holders, the copyright removal process has evolved. The way copyright holders stake a claim to their work has come a long way since Metallica had over 300,000 users banned from Napster as part of a copyright claim.