Link-Busters Sent a Billion DMCA Takedown Requests to Google Search

It’s no secret that online piracy presents a major challenge to copyright holders. With owners of pirate sites largely unresponsive, search engines and other online intermediaries are often asked to intervene.

In most cases, these takedown efforts are outsourced to third-party companies. These outfits scour the web for links to infringing material and subsequently ask the operators of these sites and services to take action.

Google processes more takedown requests than any other company. This includes infringing content stored on Drive and YouTube, as well as links to pirated content indexed by Google. We recently reported that the total number of takedowns processed by the search engine is nearing 10 billion.

Busting a Billion URLs

Google Search officially began reporting these numbers publicly in 2012. Initially, the takedown efforts were largely driven by music and movie industry companies, with the adult entertainment outfits taking over after that. Today, however, the publishing category stands out.

This week, anti-piracy outfit Link-Busters sent its one billionth DMCA takedown request to Google. At the time of writing, the counter is at 1,015,949,711, but that could easily be dozens of millions higher by next week.

Link-Busters is the first reporting company to reach the billion takedowns mark for Google Search. It beat Aylo subsidiary MG Premium to the punch, and leaves many others behind at considerable distance.

The takedown company, which is domiciled in Amsterdam, Netherlands, has been in business for more than a decade. When sending a few million takedowns per year just a few years ago, it barely stood out. It can now reach those numbers in a single day.

Publisher-Driven

Looking at Link-Busters’ record-breaking numbers, we see that they are largely driven by publishing companies. The rise of shadow libraries, combined with the threat of AI scraping, has made these companies very active on the anti-piracy front.

Websites such as Z-Library and Anna’s Archive allow the public to download free books. These books can also be used for AI training, legally or not. To prevent this, publishers try to make these sites unfindable in Google.

Looking at Link-Busters’ ten most-targeted domains, we see three Anna’s Archive domains on top, followed by a series of Z-Library domains. These ten alone are already good for over 220 million reported URLs.

The table also shows the top rightsholders working with the anti-piracy company. These are all publishing companies, with Penguin Random House clearly standing out, with over a quarter billion takedowns. Other request senders include HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Hachette.

Takedowns in Perspective

The publishers seem content with the Link-Busters service, according to the various testimonials we’ve read. However, it’s worth stressing that one billion takedowns doesn’t equate to one billion removals from Google search.

As shown below, roughly 75% of the reported URLs were removed. Other URLs were not in Google’s index (21%) but were blacklisted instead. The remaining links were sent in more than once (2%), or were not removed for other reasons (1%).

The fact that shadow libraries have many millions of URLs, which are duplicated across dozens of domains, helped Link-Busters reach these record numbers. And since the targeted sites remain resilient, we can expect these numbers to increase further.

In the past, we have noticed that Link-Busters wasn’t always with the times. For example, it targeted stale Megaupload URLs, several years after the site was taken down. The same happened with Rapidshare links a few years later.

Nowadays, the list of targeted domains appears to be managed better. For example, the company reported links for the seized Z-Library domain z-lib.org on November 27, 2022, not long after it was seized by the U.S. Government.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.