Google has been asked to take down over a million websites

Google has received requests to remove more than 100 million links since January 2013 for web pages deemed to be in breach of copyright laws. That is double the number it received for the whole of 2012 and a sign that publishers are stepping up their battle against internet piracy. Copyright holders send millions of “takedown” requests to google every week to make pirated material harder to access online.

But critics say the approach is wrong.

“As soon as you take down one page another pops up in its place, “says Mark Mulligan, a technology analyst at Midia Capital. “It’s like playing Whack-A-Mole.” “This is because file sharing has become very decentralized – there’s no centralized server you can just shut down.”

One digital content provider specializing in, Degban, makes requests for about 300,000 link removals per month on behalf of clients and has asked for 31 million web pages, or URLs, to be removed from Google’s results so far, reports the search engine.

The website domains concerned are entirely person-to-person file-sharing services, such as Fenopy.eu, extratorrent.com, torrenthound.com, filestube.com and bittorrent.com.

More than half of Degban’s URL requests were made on behalf of Froytal Services, a pornography producer, giving an indication of the kind of content people are sharing online.

But other major copyright owners making the most takedown requests included the BPI and its member companies, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the various film studios, such as Warner Brothers.

A spokesperson for the BPI told the BBC: “BPI removes around one million links every week to music hosted on the internet without the artist’s knowledge or permission.

“This process is one of the many initiatives undertaken by the industry to help to create breathing space for more than 70 legal music services in the UK that strive to promote and reward musicians.”

After years of spent attempting to clean the internet’s murky waters, Google’s latest transparency report reveals it has now received takedown requests for over a million different sites, with its individual URL removal request count now reaching the billions, these new figures suggest that pirates now have more options than ever before when it comes to stealing digital cargo. The number of takedown requests is up significantly from last year, thanks to copyright-holders increasingly widespread use of algorithms that automatically inform Google of copyright-infringement content.

While the numbers are staggering, it is hardly surprising that the world’s most populous search engine gets inundated with requests to remove illegal content from its search engine. What is unusual is, however, that the report shows sites like The White House and the U.S. Department of Justice have had requests to remove their content. The U.S. Government is not alone though, with legitimate sites like NASA, Netflix, the BBC and the New York Times also regularly making the nauseating list.

Some of these baffling requests can of course, be challenged directly to copyright software errors, but interestingly, google’s transparency reports also expose governments that are trying to censor certain content. With political articles and videos regularly coming under fire from governments around the world, transparency reports allow citizens to easily track their government.

Other reports, however, are less nefarious. A site that is no stranger to being unjustly harassed by copyright holders is the movie database site, IMDB. Where most legitimate sites are getting accidental reports in the dozens, in recent years the popular movie page has had requests to remove over 1000 of its URLs. Unsurprisingly, Google refused to remove the site’s URLs from search results.

Still, many of these copyright infringements can undoubtedly be linked with a rise in piracy. With US internet service providers recently abandoning their piracy warning system before the UK has even implemented the policy, it seems as though making piracy sites harder to find is currently many rights’ holders best option.