Okay, not quite a google, but according to an article today at TorrentFreak, a still quite respectable 345,169,134 takedown notices were submitted by copyright holders in 2014. The takedown notices take advantage of a provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows copyright owners or their representatives (e.g., the MPAA or the RIAA) to report sites that contain allegedly infringing content to search engine providers like Google. As the article notes, “[t]hese requests have increased dramatically over the years. In 2008, [Google] received only a few dozen takedown notices during the entire year, but today it processes more than a million reported ‘pirate’ links per day.” The goal of copyright holders is to stop the alleged infringement and steer “prospective customers away from pirate sites.” Unfortunately for the copyright holders, the sheer number of DMCA takedown notices is indicative of the scale of the infringing online activity taking place every day. Read the full article here.

By Coolcaesar (Googleplexwelcomesign.jpg) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Reposted from TorrentFreak.