The BPI has pulled no punches in its criticisms of Google’s sluggishness in demoting piracy sites in its search rankings recently. But behind the scenes, there’s some interesting stuff going on. It seems the BPI and US body the RIAA have both significantly upped the number of takedown requests they’re sending to Google: 1.6m in the last month from the RIAA, and 1.4m from the BPI according to Google’s Transparency Report. TorrentFreak has been digging around for more data, claiming that in June this year the RIAA was sending around 100k takedown requests a week to Google, while the BPI was sending 70k. Yet in the second week of November, the RIAA sent 463k requests, before upping that to 666k (no joke) last week. The strategy, presumably, is to ensure the biggest piracy sites get enough takedowns to trigger that long-awaited rankings demotion – or provide evidence of the rightsholder bodies’ belief that Google isn’t delivering on its promises in this area.
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