The portal has finally published its first transparency report, which discloses backroom events. Talking about the copyright violations, Reddit detailed the number of takedown requests received and noted that 62% of them were rejected as invalid or overbroad.

Everyone knows that Reddit is one of the most popular news and social networking websites. In fact, this community-driven giant is on the 28th place in the world by popularity, and the 9th most trafficked in the US. The site is a decade old, and according to the disclosed statistics, has 174 million unique visitors from 186 countries. When it comes to such a huge audience, it is not a surprise that some of the site’s users infringed copyright last year. Before, Reddit kept details of subsequent complaints private, but its first transparency report gives some insight into 2014.

The most amazing fact is that the website received very few takedown requests: only 218 requests to take down some material, 176 of which were DMCA-style copyright notices. The site also explained that real humans processed all requests received, unlike the entities sending the notices. Apparently, in 2/3 of the cases those people didn’t like what they see, because Reddit removed content in only 38% instances and rejected the rest of notices.

In addition, it is known that the rights owners have approached Google to have entire Reddit communities removed from its indexes. While Google usually rejects such requests, Reddit isn’t happy about them. The matter is that Reddit doesn’t host any material of its own. Instead, its users may post links to content hosted elsewhere, and this happens often. For some reason, copyright owners see the posts containing the links to infringing entertaining content as facilitation of infringement. However, Reddit has its own opinions on this matter, saying that since the links don’t actually infringe copyright, it exercises extra scrutiny in assessing takedowns. By the way, Google might argue the same point, but the search giant prefers to remove millions of links every week.

So, it turns out that despite the millions of users, Reddit doesn’t have a significant copyright infringement problem. As a result, rights owners ignore the site or complain to Google instead.