Google Received 345m Takedown Notices in 2014

The tech giant was required to take down 345 million links to copyrighted material last year, which is almost double the amount requested the year before. Over 17% of those requests came from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the collective body for the British music business – this entity submitted over 60 million notices.

According to the media reports, most of those notices were honored, and the requested links have been removed from Google’s search results. But not in all cases – sometimes Google takes no action if it decides that the links do not lead to any copyright infringement or they have already been taken down.

According to the statistics, most takedown notices were provided for three domains: rapidgator.net, 4shared.com, and uploaded.net – each of them accounted for over 5 million requests.

Google admitted that online piracy still remains a challenge, and the company takes it seriously, developing and deploying anti-piracy solutions. In response, the BPI claims that when people search for music or video, they should get legal results and nothing else. The agency insists that Google’s efforts should guide more consumers to such legitimate services as Spotify, Deezer and iTunes, not to fraudulent torrent or hosting services. In this case, such efforts would represent a step forward for musicians, labels and other content creators. This is why the British Phonographic Industry will continue negotiations with the search engines and government to make sure such measures bring result. However, the anti-piracy outfit recognized that Google does realize the need to take further action.

Apparently, the entertainment industry believes that Google goes not far enough, because it refuses to automatically delist such illegal services as The Pirate Bay.

Netflix Can’t Block VPN Users

Apparently, Netflix appeared to have hefty financial incentive not to block members using VPN services. The matter is that over 30 million of its subscribers live in countries where Netflix is actually unavailable if not for the use of location-masking software. This is how many people have to opt for the technological loophole in order to watch material not licensed for their country.

According to statistics, the streaming video provider has over 20m users in China alone, although Netflix has not yet launched in that country. This means that all those users have to connect via VPNs. However, not every Netflix “user” is a subscriber to the service, because many people watch it at a friend’s house or share a username with others. A few months ago, Netflix had 16 million international members, which is far less than the total number of users of the service. Anyway, the service won’t block considerable levels of traffic coming from outside their official countries, as it still earns money from it.

And Netflix has already denied the claims that it has changed its policy on VPN, though it can’t officially welcome VPN users either, because its fraught relationship with content providers hinges on them enforcing international restrictions. People who had troubles with accessing the service via VPNs were told that nothing has changed in Netflix policy.

In the meantime, the recent hack of the Sony Pictures movie studio showed just how much Hollywood studios care about VPN usage, because emails from 2013 showed a Sony executive complaining that Netflix fails to closely monitor where some of its subscribers are registering from. Beside, Netflix was accused of taking no steps to tackle circumvention websites that allow users to subscribe illegally. Australia and South Africa were mentioned as countries with high Netflix penetration despite absence of legal Netflix services. The statistics show that 5% of online users in those nations used Netflix in December 2014.

It is believed that accessing better entertainment content is the most common reason for using virtual private networks. Besides, accessing social networks is big in such regions as China. Finally, quite a lot of people use them to hide their identity, especially in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.